Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., ARA, RWS

(British, 1833-1898)

The Answering String

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
With Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
Christie's, London, The artist's studio sale, 16-18 July 1898, lot 22, described as a pastel.
Lady Frances Jane Horner (née Frances Jane Graham), 1898-1940.
Thence by descent.
Private collection, UK.

Exhibited
Brussels, International Exhibition, British Fine Art Section, 1897, ex-cat. (according to a label on the reverse, listed as property of the artist).
London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Drawings and Studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1899, no. 63, described as 'Design in gold and water colours of a female figure, with oriental drapery over her head, standing holding a Cithern [Cithara] in the Green Court of a Building by a Barred Window.' (lent by Mrs Horner).

Literature
William Cosmo Monkhouse, Burlington Fine Arts Club Drawings and Studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart, 1899, cat no. 63, p. 15.
Fortunée de Lisle, Burne-Jones, 1904, p. 187 (owned by J. F. Horner).
Malcolm Bell, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, An Illustrated Record and Review, 5th Edition, 1910, appendix II, p. 132, as 'Unfinished picture' in the Studio sale, Christie's 16-18 July 1898.

The present lot is listed in the online catalogue for the Committee of the Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonné Foundation which can be viewed at www.eb-j.org. Painted in 1896, the figure in the present lot is from a study for The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon. As the catalogue notes: 'This figure was first included as an attendant musician in the first composition of The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, she stands to the left of the mausoleum, next to the head of King Arthur. Not using the figure in the later designs, Burne-Jones thought it too good to completely abandon and in 1896 he took it up and made it an independent work.'¹

A heavily draped female figure, her head covered, stands in an enclosed space beside a building of stone construction and with a single barred window. A woman stands in the foreground holding a dulcimer the strings of which she appears to pluck. The drawing's title – The Answering String – seems to imply that she has found a way to communicate with an unseen person who is held captive in a cell, by striking a note on her instrument and awaiting the reply.

The motif of a figure playing a stringed instrument occurs quite frequently in Burne-Jones's output. At the centre of the mural decoration that he made for William and Jane Morris's home, Red House, in 1860 is a man playing some kind of primitive fiddle; while the artist's composition, The Mill (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), begun in 1870, has a figure standing beneath an archway playing a dulcimer at the right side. Perhaps the most immediately familiar image of someone attempting to play an instrument in the context of Victorian art was George Frederic Watts's Hope (various versions, including that in the Tate commenced 1886), where the instrument has only one string remaining and yet which the figure persists in attempting to play.

In the last years of his life Burne-Jones completed a number of head studies and figurative compositions of this type using gold paint to make works of the utmost richness and ornamental quality, complete in themselves and intended for display as aesthetic objects. For example, in 1890, he showed a series of 'Designs in Gold' at the New Gallery. Of the particular skill required in the use of gold paint, Burne-Jones told his assistant Thomas Matthews Rooke: 'This gold work must be done very directly – it's an art of itself. I forget how to do it between one time and another, and it's always an experiment'.²

The provenance of the present lot is fascinating; when loaned to the posthumous exhibition of Burne-Jones' work at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, the work is listed as 'lent by Mrs Horner'. Frances Jane Horner (née Graham) (1854-1940) was the daughter of the Liberal MP William Graham, who became one of Burne-Jones' most ardent patrons. Graham owned a number of Burne-Jones works, including some early panels from the Briar Rose series. Graham also held an excellent collection of early Italian works, which he would loan to the artist for inspiration. He helped managed Burne-Jones' financial affairs and even oversaw the sale of his paintings. Graham's daughter Frances became a great friend of Burne-Jones; as a child she would accompany her father to the artists' studio. As a young adult, Frances and her father would accompany the artist to exhibitions, theatre events and circuses. 'We went about with Burne-Jones everywhere' she noted. Burne-Jones was fascinated by her, drawing her many times, and bestowing many tokens of his affection upon her: painted caskets, illuminated manuscripts, hand-made Valentines. William and Frances both sat for formal portraits in the late 1870s, and Frances appears as one of the models in Burne-Jones's monumental work The Golden Stairs, which was shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1880.³

Frances moved within the milieu of the 'Souls', an artistic and intellectual group centred around Mells, the Wiltshire home of the Horner family. The group, described by one member as 'men and women bent on pleasure, but pleasure of a superior kind... looking for their excitement in romance and sentiment'⁴ contained an extraordinary array of late Victorian politicians and intellectuals, including the Balfour, Wyndham, Grenfell and Asquith families. When, in 1883, Frances married the barrister and heir to the Mells estate John Francis Fortescue Horner (1842-1927)- Burne-Jones was said to be devastated- she became the hostess of this extraordinary circle of socialites. Frances adorned Mells with paintings and gifts from Burne-Jones - not least the 'Orpheus' piano, commissioned as a wedding gift by her father- and continued to support Burne-Jones following her father's death. Frances' daughter Katherine married into the Asquith family, Katherine becoming daughter-in-law of H. H. Asquith, who served as prime minister during the First World War.

¹www.eb-j.org.
²Mary Lago, Burne-Jones Talking, London, 1981, p. 143.
³Charlotte Gere, writing in Edward Burne-Jones, ed. Alison Smith, London, 2018, pp.151-154.
⁴Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries; Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914, part One: 1888–1900, New York, 1923, p.53.


We are grateful to the Committee of the Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonné Foundation for their assistance in cataloguing this work.