Studio: international art (72.1918)

Pre-Raphaelite Windows at Bradford

3. "SIR TRISTRAM DEMANDS LA BELLE ISOUDE”
DESIGNED BY VAL PRINSEP

4. "SIR TRISTRAM DRINKS A LOVE-PHILTRE WITH ISOUDE
DESIGNED BY D. G. ROSSETTI

EXECUTED BY WILLIAM MORRIS’S FIRM IN 1862 AND RECENTLY ACQUIRED BY THE CORPORATION OF BRADFORD

or with a non-ecclesiastical subject, to come
their way. It was a task after Morris’s own
heart. Inevitably he turned for subjects to
the “ Mort d’Arthur,” and for designers to the
friends who had under the same inspiration
carried out the ill-fated decoration of the Oxford
Union. The Oxford frescoes had dealt mainly
with the life of King x\rthur ; for this series of
windows the love of Tristram and Iseult was
selected, and there exists a copy of a narrative
put into Mr. Dunlop's hands in which Morris—
one cannot mistake the style of the story-teller,
though he had yet to discover his own genius
in that direction—sorts out the tangled strands
of Malory’s story, and weaves it into an intel-
ligible whole, annotating the margin with brief
suggestions of the pictorial possibilities.

The first of the series of designs was furnished
by Arthur Hughes—a picture so delicately
beautiful that one may well regret that this
was the only work which Arthur Hughes ever
executed for the Morris firm. Edward Burne-
Jones—Morris’s principal designer—drew four
of the drawings, and two are by Rossetti.
The latter must have been among the first
work w'hich Rossetti executed after the death
of his wife, and they were doubtless wrought
out in the evenings in the drawing-room studio
of his new home in Cheyne Walk, amid the
70

brilliant talk of that fascinating circle—Swin-
burne, Meredith, the poet-artist’s own clever
sister, and sometimes Tennyson and Carlyle.
Minor artistic tasks like these were saved for
such occasions. One of the designs—of cha-
racteristically uncouth vigour—was by Madox
Brown, one by Val Prinsep, who had been
among the original decorators of the Oxford
Union, but did not do much work for the firm.
Four were by Morris himself, two being inci
dents in the story, and two rather stiff figure-
subjects with somewdiat of the church-window
convention.

The colour in all the windows is excellent
—not only in comparison with the strident
work of the day, but excellent even in the light
of the better technical traditions which Morris
did so much to establish, or to re-establish.
Very deep rubv-reds and intense olive-greens
make the pictures difficult to render satis-
factorily by photography, but these difficulties
have been well overcome in the accompanying
reproductions, which are from negatives by Mr.
W. E. Preston, the deputy-purator of the Cart-
wright Hall galleries.

It has been suggested that the Tristram and
Iseult windows were originally executed for
Birket Foster’s beautiful house at Witley, and
that the Bradford set is a replica. This is