Last Pre-raphaelite, The [Hardcover]

When it was announced that one of our greatest writers of biography, Fiona MacCarthy, was preparing a biography of Edward Burne-Jones there were many who waited eagerly for its publication - the book, which took 6 years to write, does not disappoint. Indeed, it is probably one of the very best biographies in our time of an artist, of the same insightful quality as the author's own prize-winning biography of William Morris William Morris. It is fitting that it is Fiona MacCarthy who now tells us about the other side of a friendship, between Morris and Burne-Jones, which began when they met as students in Oxford. It is no exaggeration to say that this friendship completely changed the face of English art and design. Although she asserts early in the book that Burne-Jones was the greater artist while Morris was `unarguably the greater man', by the time that you finish this book you realise that this is only a relative judgement because Burne-Jones was also a great man. He was much loved and admired: Kipling said `He was more to me than any man here... The man was a God to me.'; Henry James said `He was a wonderfully nice creature'; and the American poet Emma Lazarus considered him `so gentle, so kind and earnest and so full of poetry and imagination that he shines out of all the people I have seen, with a sort of glamour of his own.'
But Burne-Jones was a very private man and a challenge to a biographer. Luckily, his devoted wife Georgiana wrote a wonderful, sensitive and loyal account of him soon after he died, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Volume 1 Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Volume 2 of which MacCarthy makes much use, together with the hundreds of letters he wrote and received - now scattered around the world and largely unpublished. She also travelled to places, especially in Italy, that meant a lot to Burne-Jones. This helps to make the book especially vivid. But in the end she says that her main source has been his incredible output of paintings, stained glass windows, tapestries, embroideries and painted furniture: `the life is there, self-evident, embedded in the art'.
As you read this gripping story, you become aware of two strong driving forces in the life of Burne-Jones: the quest for beauty and the quest for love. The first is the more public face of the man, who believed `only this is true, that beauty is very beautiful, and softens, and comforts, and inspires, and lifts up, and never fails.' His art reflects the continued quest for beauty and that is one of its great attractions, together with an indefinable quality of mood and feeling. The more private quest, that for love, is sensitively dealt with by MacCarthy who describes his friendships with numerous women and indeed with young girls. One gets the feeling that he very much needed love and also to give love. He had a special attraction to vulnerable women and in some cases this lasted a life-time. Perhaps the best documented example is his attachment to May Gaskell, so movingly told in the book by Josceline Dimbleby, May and Amy: A True Story of Family, Forbidden Love, and the Secret Lives of May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones to whom he wrote more than 700 letters over a two-year period.
It is impossible to do justice to this extraordinarily rich book in a short review. Reading it, I was amazed at how much research MacCarthy has done and how well she integrates it into a highly readable story that puts Burne-Jones in the context of Victorian England. There are many fascinating insights into Burne-Jones's paintings and, although the book has more illustrations than usual in a biography, you will want to have access to the internet or to the excellent book by Wildman and Christian EDWARD BURNE-JONES, Victorian, Artist-Dreamer, with Essays by Alan Crawford and Laurence des Cars in order to see the paintings. One small quibble: why didn't the publisher put references to the illustrations within the text?
Without doubt, this is the definitive biography of Burne-Jones and it is likely to remain so for a long time. I urge everyone who likes his works to read it and so enrich their understanding of the man and of his work.

This is a thorough and very well-written biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898). He comes across as a sweet-natured, loving and lovable, witty, sensitive, and workoholic person, extremely susceptible to the charms of young women and pre-pubescent girls whom he referred to as his "pets", and deeply upset when they married. He also had a serious and fraught love affaire for a time with Maria Zambaco. All that put a great strain on his wife Georgiana, who endured all this stoically and would, after his death, write an affectionate two-volume memoir of his life (omitting all mention of Maria Zambaco). We are told that all these women were at one time or another models for Burne-Jones' paintings and designs, though I must say that the faces of the women in his pictures look almost indistinguishable one from another - see for example all the maidens in one of his most famous ones, "The Golden Staircase", for whom Fiona MacCarthy provides a partial key. Even when he draws them, beautifully, from life, they mostly look quite similar to each other. (Incidentally I have been able to find only a single drawing of a young man, and that was his son. When he drew the children of his friends, it seems he drew only the daughters, never, as far as I can tell, their brothers.)

Burne-Jones also had a warm and touching relationship with his friend and colleague William Morris, and the biography brings out very well how very different they were: Morris short and dumpy, Burne-Jones more ethereal; Morris becoming politically increasingly radical, while Burne-Jones' temperamental liberalism sat rather uncomfortably with the high society in which he increasingly moved and which Morris despised; Burne-Jones loving Italian art while Morris increasingly turned against Italian art and found inspiration in Nordic mythologies. But they had brealkfast together almost every Sunday, and Burne-Jones worked for Morris' company in a huge variety of media, designing tiles, tapestries, stained glass windows, and illustrations for Morris' Kelmscott Press. Of course there is a full account of Burne-Jones' huge artistic output which made him in the second half of his life the most famous English artist, although near its end (he died in 1898) his work was falling out of fashion and only relatively recently have the pre-Raphaelites in general and Burne-Jones in particular recovered some respect.

Burne-Jones and Morris joined the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood when they were all still quite young, and so this biography has a good deal about the complicated lives not only of Burne-Jones but of Rossetti and Millais and about their advocate John Ruskin.

If there is one minor criticism I would make of this splendid book it is that there is almost too much detail about the daily lives of Burne-Jones and all the people around him in the 536 pages of the text. I would have preferred the author to have given us instead more of the stories behind the paintings she mentions (usually without dates): even more than is the case with other pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones' pictures allude to mythologies which are little known these days, though they can of course all be looked up on the Internet, and on Google Images we can find almost all the works the author mentions. Reading this book has been a most rewarding experience.