QOTD: Edward Burne-Jones, On the Beauty of Art

I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be–in a light better than any light that ever shone–in a land no one can define or remember, only desire–Edward Burne-Jones

Another of my hometown heroes: We were both born in Birmingham, in the UK, just a bit more than 121 years apart, and a snippet of one of his most famous paintings, Owain Departs from Landine, has been the keynote image on a couple of my most popular posts on a couple of different sites over the years:

You can find the most recent version of the post on this site, here.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham on August 28, 1833, and worked his most productive years as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a number of other luminaries of the arts-and-crafts movement in contemporary English art and literature.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful–William Morris

I’ve tried to hew to that over the years.  Not always successfully, but it’s a useful guidepost.

Like most of his fellows in the rather avant-garde movement, Burne-Jones was a bit, umm, weird for his time, although the scandals surrounding him were rather fewer in number and less in intensity than those surrounding–say–Morris and Rossetti.   His reputation had its ups and downs, and–by the time of his death in 1896, Burne-Jones wasn’t very much in favor with the art establishment and was honored with a memorial in Westminster Abbey only due to the intervention of an admirer, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII).

It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the work of the medievalists and their tale-tellers began to find favor again that Burne-Jones’s reputation was healed.  And the story of the pre-Raphaelites was told in full.

There’s been an stellar exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelites, the city’s native sons, at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for decades.  I’ve seen it.  It’s wonderful.  God only knows what will happen to it now that the city has–like so many in the UK–gone bankrupt over its social welfare and progressive schemes, and is selling off one asset after another to try and cover the debt.  It’s rumored that the museum itself will be on the block one day.  God forbid.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel:

And the accompanying poem, which reverses the conceit of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, telling instead the story of the dead woman looking down from Heaven and imagining her eventual reunion with her still-living lover.  Here’s an excerpt:

THE blessed Damozel lean’d out
From the gold bar of Heaven:
Her blue grave eyes were deeper much
Than a deep water, even.
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary’s gift
On the neck meetly worn;
And her hair, lying down her back,
Was yellow like ripe corn.

Herseem’d she scarce had been a day
One of God’s choristers;
The wonder was not yet quite gone
From that still look of hers;
Albeit, to them she left, her day
Had counted as ten years.

(To one it is ten years of years:
…Yet now, here in this place,
Surely she lean’d o’er me,—her hair
Fell all about my face….
Nothing: the Autumn-fall of leaves.
The whole year sets apace.)