Venturing All on the Unseen

In late 1872 Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting England, was taken by his friend Charles Eliot Norton to the studio-home of Edward Burne-Jones. "The richness and beauty of poetic fancy in the pictures," Norton noted, "the simplicity, sweetness, and wide cultivation of B-J, struck Emerson with surprise. He had not thought that there was so complete an artist in England." Five years later, at the opening of the new Grosvenor Gallery, Henry James saw Burne-Jones as "quite the lion of the exhibition" (which also included works by Whistler, G. F. Watts, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Frederic Leighton) and "quite at the head of the English painters of our day." James characterized his work as embodying "the art of culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of aesthetic refinement"—an art "furnished by literature, by poetry, by history, by erudition." For the readers of Fors Clavigera, John Ruskin, the preeminent Victorian art critic, was even more enthusiastic: "His work . . . is simply the only art-work at present produced in England which will be received by the future as 'classic' in its kind. . . . I know that these [pictures] will be immortal." Within a few years of Burne-Jones's death, however, his claim to immortality was questioned; and only in the past three decades has he taken his place as one of England's greatest artists. In her excellent biography of the artist Fiona MacCarthy traces his rise and fall from fame, and his triumphant resurgence.

MacCarthy views Burne-Jones as "the licensed escapist of the period, perpetrating an art of ancient myths, magical landscapes, incessant sexual yearnings, that expressed deep psychological needs for contemporaries." As the author of a superb life of William Morris (which I reviewed here in 1997), MacCarthy has reservations about her subject: "He was the greater artist although Morris was unarguably the greater man." Like his closest friend Burne-Jones "was set against the age," but, unlike Morris, he expressed himself entirely in his art and avoided political involvement. "I have no politics," he maintained, "and no party, and no particular hope: only this is true, that beauty is very beautiful, and softens and comforts, and inspires, and rouses, and lifts up, and never fails." MacCarthy subtitled her Morris biography, "A Life for Our Time." Burne-Jones, by contrast, is described as "The Last Pre-Raphaelite"—a spokesman for the "Victorian Imagination." To the modern sensibility Burne-Jones's artistic credo may seem a bit too detached from life: "I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than has ever shone—in a land no one can ever define or remember, only desire." MacCarthy's considerable achievement in this book is to have removed her subject from this artistic dreamland and placed him firmly on real ground.

Are women better biographers than men? Recalling the splendid biographies written by Janet Browne (Darwin), Hermione Lee (Wharton, Woolf), Hilary Spurling (Matisse), Claire Tomalin (Pepys, Austen, Dickens), among others, I am tempted to agree with MacCarthy—here speaking of the widow Georgina Burne-Jones's Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904): "It is the woman's sense of the importance of domestic background and emotional history that distinguishes her book from the event-centred biographies of men written by men." The three best Burne-Jones biographies were written by women: besides MacCarthy's, which is by far the fullest, there are those by Georgina and by the great British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, who wittily observed of Burne-Jones that "nearly every woman he met wanted to look after him."

In real life Edward Jones's life began inauspiciously in 1833 with the death of his mother. (An older sister had already died in infancy.) A sense of guilt at having caused her death never left him ("I don't think it is ever out of my mind what hurt I did when I was born"); and "he claimed that this...