loved? From a very early age he was attracted to medieval structures, architecture humanised with carving and bright colours. Like the young William Morris he detested the repetitive soullessness of the Crystal Palace, with its “gigantic wearisomeness of glass and iron”. As he grew older he came to appreciate buildings that were fluent, personal, unpompous: William Morris’s Red House, which Burne-Jones himself had a hand in decorating, in contrast to Gladstone’s overbearing Hawarden Castle, compared by Burne-Jones to a railway hotel. His favourite buildings tended to be
churches. Burne-Jones had himself once been intended for the church, and although he lost his faith he never lost his feeling for church buildings as ideal artistic entities. He came to believe that the summit of all art was a beautiful cathedral “which holds all other arts within it”, combining architecture, painting, sculpture, music and poetry. Of medieval cathedrals his prime example was the mystic, marvellous, still-unfinished Beauvais, followed closely by Chartres, with its wonderful sculpture and stained glass. Some of the very finest of Burne-Jones’s
work would be for newly-designed 19th-century churches: his stained glass for PhilipWebb’s St Martin’s, Brampton and a whole succession of GF Bodley’s churches; his astonishing mosaics for GE Street’s American Episcopalian church, St Paul’s-within-the-Walls, in Rome. Unlike many Victorian designers of stained glass, Burne-Jones was innately sympathetic to the architectural context, aware of the relationship between the coloured glass, the leading of the window and the stonework that surrounded it. He understood the power of the architectural whole. In Burne-Jones’s final decade his capacity
for outrage at buildings he considered shoddy, pretentious and despicable increased. In 1896 we find him fulminating against the newly opened National Portrait Gallery. “A pokey hole it is, and with the exception ofWatts’s a dreadful lot of things they have there,” he complained. “The rest aren’t much above the level of Madame Tussaud’s.” For Burne-Jones the republican there was far too much emphasis on portraits of the Royal family. He describes the lower galleries as gloomy dark cellars where you could see nothing, while the top ones were raked with blinding light from skylights placed too close to the portraits. Fit for purpose the National Portrait Gallery was not. He was similarly caustic about new building
90 Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011
THECRYSTALPALACE, WITH ITS “GIGANTIC WEARISOMENESS OF GLASS AND IRON”.
SOULLESSNESSOF
‘BURNE-JONES DETESTEDTHE REPETITIVE
AS HEAGEDHE CAME TO APPRECIATE
BUILDINGS THAT WERE FLUENT, PERSONAL,
UMPOMPOUS’
Top, Burne-Jones and Morris worked closely on various stained glass commissions at a time when the SPAB was about to launch. This detail is of Dante as a mourner, from the crucifixion window for St James’s church, Brighouse, made in 1876
Middle, Burne-Jones’s 1896 cartoon of himself with Morris, being blessed by the saintly spirit of Chaucer
Left, the younger Morris at the loom, a parody, perhaps not too far removed from reality, of his dear friend’s passion for crafts
BRIDGEMAN
COURTESY THEWILLIAM MORRIS GALLERY
COURTESY BRADFORD MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
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