Burne-Jones by Frederick Wedmore — Read

Unexpectedly and suddenly, from an attack of _angina pectoris_, following upon the pest of influenza, Sir Edward Burne-Jones died yesterday morning. He was sixty-five years old, and he looked worn for his age -- a man of delicate appearance, and certainly of great sensitiveness; yet, as it had seemed already, of much staying power, -- a ‘creaking gate,' as his friends thought, not so very regretfully, since destined, in all probability, to ‘hang long. ' But now his work and life have been arrested; the laborious days which he had lived for forty years of manhood are for ever over, and the wan face of the untiring craftsman, which bent eagerly over his task, and brightened with quick sensibility in the relaxation of the social hour, is for ever still. ‘Finis' is written to the volume of achievement of one of the greater practitioners in what we may call the second generation of the English Pre-Raphaelites.

Of the first Pre-Raphaelites -- of those of the first generation -- more than one changed his ways, his work, his whole conception of Art, obviously, as time went on, and the most illustrious of them all -- Millais -- was far enough removed from a Pre-Raphaelite in the end. But of that distinguished and untiring practitioner of the second generation, whose hold, of late years at least, upon the English and to some extent upon the French public has become phenomenal, though it will not be constant, it is certainly to be noted that although there was, at different times, an unequal capacity, there was at no time visible change in the direction of his tastes or in the method of his work. Of the human figure Burne-Jones was not at the first an excellent, and was never, at any time, an absolutely faultless draughtsman. Yet the poetry of his figure-drawing, the almost feminine tenderness with which he followed the lines of dainty human movement, the dreamy grace that was in the place of strength, the elegant diffuseness, so to say, which was characteristic of his style -- never even by accident tense and terse -- these things are noticeable in his earlier water-colours and in the very latest of his performances in this year's New Gallery. It was as a water-colour painter that he first began to be known. A pupil of Rossetti, as far as he was a pupil of any one, Burne-Jones was from the beginning romantic, and he was affluent in colour.