BRIDGEMAN
wherewas burne-jones?
in Malvern when, in 1897, he was sent there by his doctor to recuperate from illness. The historic spa town was being redeveloped. The view from his hotel room across to Malvern’s mean new houses with horrible slate roofs drove him to despair: “here be 10,000 of them glittering away like sardine boxes as I look out of my window.” Like William Morris he raged at the way in which cynical commercial architecture led to the impoverishment of human lives.
I
n the middle 1890s Burne-Jones was once again involved in several important conservation campaigns. One of these was the protest against the threatened destruction of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea,Wren’s imposing 17th-century building for army veterans. The old soldiers
were now to be moved out and sent away to live with relatives. Burne-Jones was not a natural admirer of
classical architecture, nor indeed a fan of Wren, but he felt a deep dismay at the potential loss of such a central visual feature of the London landscape. He understood so well how psychologically important these key historic buildings were to the whole nation, providing essential orientation points.
Burne-Jones’s ‘The Mirror of Venus’, one of the works which absorbed much of his creative energy in the first half of the 1870s. It was shown at the sensational Grosvenor Gallery show in May 1877, soon after the SPAB’s foundation. Left, with Morris, at the time that the Society and its work were being formulated
THE SPABArchives show not just Burne-Jones himself but also his wife Georgiana and son Philip being drawn into the large and well-orchestrated protest of 1896 at the proposal to rebuild part of the West Front of Peterborough Cathedral. Early the following year his support was enlisted for the Society’s objections to the damage done to early wallpaintings in the crypt atWorcester Cathedral. This portion of the crypt, part of St Walstan’s Chapel, had been reconfigured to provide a chamber to house the motor for blowing the bellows of the new electric organ. The chapel was now cut in two by the new wall and the wallpaintings obliterated by a thick coating of black pitch applied to keep out the damp. Burne-Jones’s response was predictably
ferocious.Wallpainting was an art he especially revered. He had done a good deal of wallpainting himself, at the Oxford Union as well as at Morris’s Red House. Besides, the father of the last love of his life, May Gaskell, was a Canon ofWorcester Cathedral.
Cornerstone, Vol 32, No 3 2011 91
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