WhydidNed missthat meeting?
SPAB came into being one day in March 1877, when William Morris and kindred spirits gathered formally for the first time to fight the destruction and defacement of ancient buildings. Yet Morris’s dearest friend, the artist Edward Burne-Jones, was not there. FionaMacCarthy, biographer of Morris and, now, Burne-Jones, sheds light on the painter’s passion for old architecture
travelled together in France and Italy, thrilled by the ancient buildings that they saw and conscious that many were coming under threat. When it came to the church buildings of England Burne-Jones, with his special feeling for stained glass, shared Morris’s conviction that “our ancient buildings are not mere ecclesiastical toys, but sacred monuments of the nation’s growth and love”. So why did Burne-Jones send his apologies
T
for absence from the SPAB’s inaugural meeting on 22 March 1877 at the Morris & Co. showroom at 26 Queen Square? For those who know their Burne-Jones, the answer is not hard to find. As a painter he was a notorious procrastinator, often finishing a picture in a frenzy of activity shortly before an exhibition opened. Through March and April of that year Burne-Jones was involved in last-minute preparations for the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, opening in May. A desperate letter sent to his son Philip says: “I worked till Thursday night at pictures for the Grosvenor, and now I never want to hear the word again.”
88 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011
here is a mystery concerning Edward Burne-Jones and the SPAB. At the time the Society was founded, in 1877, he wasWilliam Morris’s oldest and best friend. They had both been undergraduates at Oxford. They had
We have to forgive Burne-Jones for his
absence. The first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery was the moment when, after many struggles, he achieved real public recognition as an artist, showing what now seem such quintessential works as The Mirror of Venus and The Beguiling of Merlin. He was never, in any case, much of a committee man. Burne-Jones’s membership of the SPAB Foreign Committee was purely nominal: he is on record as having attended only two meetings. But as a public figure of increasing fame and stature Sir Edward Burne-Jones Bt., as he became, was drawn into some crucial SPAB campaigns on behalf of several buildings that lay closest to his heart. One of these was St Mark’s, Venice, subject
Top, Burne-Jones’s affectionate depiction of the effect on him of being subjected to a poetry reading by his close friend, Morris. Above, ‘William Morris Performing a Cartwheel, Viewed from Behind by Moon and Star Light’ – Burne-Jones satirising the seam of plump, good-natured buffoonery that ran through the character of Morris
of a legendary SPAB protest in 1879. The Italian Ministry of Public Building and Works was planning to demolish and rebuild the entireWest Front of the Byzantine basilica as part of a large-scale restoration of the church. Both Morris and Burne-Jones were especially incensed, almost personally insulted, by these threats. The city of Venice was a part of their shared history. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, the book they first discovered and read avidly at Oxford, had become a kind of sacred text, defining their whole attitude to architecture and to craftsmanship. St Mark’s had a particular emotional hold on
them. This was a building Burne-Jones had visited again and again on an early study tour of Venice with his young wife Georgiana, subsidised by Ruskin, in 1862. Even then he had
FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM/BRIDGEMAN
STAPLETON COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN
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