The coldness of fairy tales

Edward Burne-Jones
Tate Britain, London, UK
24 October 2018 – 24 February 2019

Ned Jones—later Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet (1833–98)—was one of the last Pre-Raphaelites, a group who, as their name suggests, constantly looked back to the past for inspiration. He rejected the industrial world of Victorian Britain and created spectacular works depicting classical heroes, Arthurian knights, fairy-tale heroines, and angels across a range of mediums. He studied theology at Oxford, where he met his lifelong collaborator William Morris. Together they became pioneers of the Arts and Crafts movement, aiming to bring beautiful design to everyday life through the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement. After embracing the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his twenties, Burne-Jones continued to produce similar types of works until his death in 1898.

I particularly enjoyed seeing a series of his drawings at the beginning of the exhibition, which reveal his remarkable draughtsmanship. His large-scale paintings are well composed and evocative. However, I repeatedly encountered the same cool, expressionless faces—an idealised classical beauty that rarely varied. Even when he depicted real people, such as his daughter or the daughter of prime minister William Gladstone in his famous painting The Golden Stairs (on view here), all the faces share nearly identical features. It feels almost as if he recycled a single likeness, uninterested in distinguishing one woman from another.

This is the perfect exhibition to visit if you’re interested in medieval art, religion, Greek mythology, and legends, or if you want to travel back in time for inspiration. Throughout the show you can see the various mediums in which he developed his work: drawing, painting, tapestry, embroidery, jewellery, and stained-glass windows.

I didn’t find much artistic evolution across this retrospective. He was extremely famous and prolific, but his technique and style seem to have changed very little throughout his life. Perhaps this is the price one pays for immense popularity and a constant flow of commissions.

This is his first solo show at Tate since 1933, comprising more than 150 artworks from across his career, including some of his most famous paintings—The Golden Stairs, The Beguiling of Merlin and the Sleeping Beauty series—some of which are shown below. The curators of Tate Britain clearly aimed to offer a substantial homage to Burne-Jones as one of the most influential artists of the Victorian era. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a Pre-Raphaelite visionary, and although I prefer the sensuous beauty found in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I recognise Burne-Jones’s significance.

That said, I won’t deny his value as a decorative artist, his meticulous attention to detail, or his influence on the development of Art Nouveau in Britain. So if you’re drawn to classical heroes, fairy tales, or a Gothic aesthetic, you will almost certainly enjoy this exhibition.

Below you can see The Art Blackberry performing next to Burne-Jones’s Perseus and the Graiae, a painting depicting Perseus encountering the Graiae—the three sisters of the Gorgons, who share a single tooth and a single eye. As they pass the eye between them, Perseus steals it, forcing them to tell him how to find the nymphs he seeks.