Studio: international art (16.1899)

Studio-Talk

which many a visitor may pass by scarcely noticing, turned to it again, and in the beginning of 1898,

for the story it tells, The Prioress's Tale, is pro- almost as if he foreknew the end so sadly and

bably known to few, and its beauty has around unsuspectedly near at hand, he went back yet

it many rivals appealing more directly to the eye again to that first-born imagining, and did not

and asking less of the understanding. Yet it leave it until he had inscribed his signature upon a

has another story, and one well worth recording, finished work. It, too, in its turn was carried at

since it is but hinted at in the brief inscription, last from the long-familiar studio, whence no later

E. B. J. 1865-1898. As Eros was the eldest and completed picture was ever to emerge,

yet the youngest of the gods, so is it the earliest -

and yet the latest of the visions dreamt into form The collection of drawings, studies, and designs
and colour by Burne-Jones. The idea of it was by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, which has been
among the first that appealed to his pictorial arranged at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, supple-
instinct, and the design was actually the first he ments most usefully the larger show at the New
embodied in colour, painting it in oils just forty Gallery. A quite adequate number of those pre-
years ago on a cabinet for the late William Morris, liminary studies which he prepared with so much
the life-long friend whose example and encourage- care for his various pictures is being shown, but
ment first led him to abandon the prescribed path there are also included many designs for decora-
and venture, not without fear, upon the fairy-lands tions, a considerable group of pencil and crayon
of art. Seven years passed away, and many of the portraits, and a selection from the numerous funny
pictures now, for a time, its near neighbours in the drawings with which he amused himself in the
South Room, grew into being. Clerk Sanders, intervals of his more exacting labours. Some of
The Chess Players, Fair Rosamond and Queen
Eleanor, Cinderella, St. Valentine's Morning, The
Merciful Knight, and Clara and Sidonia von Bork,
among others, were begun and finished while the
first idea lay dormant.

But, though seemingly forgotten, the earliest
vision was still vital in the mind of the painter, and
in 1865, when the hand had already greatly gained
in cunning, it stirred again into activity, and im-
pelled him to begin its realisation and carry it
some way towards completion. Then once more
the impulse faltered, and it was laid aside to make
way for more strenuously insistent dreams of beauty,
and while it waited what a marvellous succession
of them blossomed into being, grew into com-
pletion before it, and passed from the studio never
to return! The Wine of Circe, begun a little
earlier, but finished long before, was with it for a
time, while the splendid Laus Veneris, and The
Feast of Peleus had become old friends before they
were finished and taken from it. The four Seasons,
Tfie Beguiling of Merlin, the great Annunciation,
and The Wheel of Fortune, the splendid series of
The Briar Rose, the long-suffering Psyche in many
plights, The Mirror of Venus, The Chant d'Amour,
and twice the lovely mystery, Love among the
Ruins, all stayed with it a while and vanished.
But to complete the tale would be to set down a
bare catalogue of the greater number of the
painter's works. At last, after three-and-thirty
years, when the magnificent Arthur in Avalon book-cover
relaxed for a time its spell, the mind of the artist
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