Abstract
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an early mentor of Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) at the time he left theological study at Oxford to pursue art in 1853. This chapter, in considering Ruskin’s idea that Burne-Jones ‘harmonised’ his art with ‘the Christian legend’, argues that theological questions underpinned the two men’s ideas; specifically, how art could be shaped by the cross of Jesus. Focussing first on Burne-Jones’ early education and subsequent reception of Ruskin’s writing, Hinzman explores Ruskin’s and Burne-Jones’ respective reactions to William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–1853). Hinzman examines how the two men imagined the role of the cross, not only in Christian theology but also in art. The image of Christ, as imagined by Burne-Jones, illustrates how he used the cross as his pattern for a supernatural art. Arguably, Ruskin’s religious imagination provides an insight into his dialogue with Burne-Jones, and illuminates Burne-Jones’ wider vision for his art.
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Notes
- 1.
Laura Cumming, ‘Edward Burne-Jones Review – An Endless Procession of the Living Dead’, The Guardian, 22 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/28/edward-burne-jones-tate-britain-review-laura-cumming, accessed June 2022.
- 2.
The online catalogue raisonné of Burne-Jones’ work was launched in 2020 and is considered ‘an ongoing project’ ‘which will take many years to complete’ because of the sheer volume of work he produced. See here: https://www.eb-j.org, accessed June 2022. The academic panel includes Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper, whose chapter on Burne-Jones can be found on pages:
- 3.
John Christian and Stephen Wildman, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), p. 84; Georgiana Burne-Jones, The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones Vol. 1 (London: Chiswick Press, 1905), p. 248; ‘Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin’s Teaching Collection at Oxford’, Ashmolean Museum, http://ruskin.ashmolean.org/collection/8994, accessed June 2022.
- 4.
John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), Vol. 35, p. 296. All other references are to the Library Edition and are given by volume and page number in the text, for example (xxxiii.296).
- 5.
Burne-Jones, Memorials, Vol. 1 (1905), pp. 1–6.
- 6.
Ibid., pp. 15–18.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 8.
Newman founded the oratory in Birmingham in 1849—the very year Burne-Jones was at Hereford—the Church of St. Anne in Alcester Street (relocating to the Edgbaston area of the city in 1852). It was said Newman preached his first sermon there to a large and diverse congregation of the poor and displaced on ‘How to Escape the False Worship of the World’. See Penelope Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1997), p. 19; Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His Age (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1990), p. 258.
- 9.
R.W. Church, The Oxford Movement. Twelve Years, 1833–1845 (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1900), p. 68.
- 10.
Elisabeth Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 24.
- 11.
Frances Knight, The Church in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2008), p. 15.
- 12.
Dominic Janes, Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840–1860 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 12.
- 13.
This is exemplified in his readings of Newman and also how he paid attention to and debated fellow students during times of theological controversy, such the Gorham Judgment of 1850. Burne-Jones, Memorials, Vol. 1 (1905), p. 52.
- 14.
School friend Richard (later Canon) Dixon would later remember how ‘For a boy of fifteen the range of information [in the letters] is great, especially as there were much fewer books of that sort that would give it directly on such subjects than there are now—and he was so busy with other things. The classification [distinguishing the different sects and their respective beliefs through time] seems to me his own, and is deliciously original…keen in judgement, and very decided…the striking thing is that in his main divisions, “Objects of Divine Worship” and “Blessings derivable from the Gospel,” he should have touched the two first great successive tendencies of theology, the one being Christology (in the early Fathers,) and the other the nature of grace (in Augustine and after)’. Ibid., p. 27.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Robert Hewison, Ian Warrell, and Stephen Wildman, Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000), p. 14.
- 18.
Ruskin wrote a letter to the Times about The Light of the World, however, it ‘was not inserted; and Ruskin, supposing that its length was the objection, withdrew it and substituted a shorter one’ (xii. xlix) (The letter is reproduced in xii.328–332.)
- 19.
Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 147.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 134.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 128, p. 147.
- 22.
Graham Howes, The Art of the Sacred: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Art and Belief (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 123; Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible (2006), p. 187.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
John Christian, ‘“A Serious Talk”: Ruskin’s Place in Burne-Jones’ Artistic Development’, in Leslie Parris, ed., The Pre-Raphaelite Papers (London: The Tate Gallery, 1984), p. 185.
- 27.
David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England 1848–1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 26–27.
- 28.
Edward Burne-Jones, ‘Mr. Ruskin’s New Volume’, The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (January 1856), pp. 223–224.
- 29.
Christian, ‘“A Serious Talk”’ (1984), p. 188.
- 30.
Burne-Jones, ‘Mr. Ruskin’s New Volume’ (1856), p. 223.
- 31.
Ibid., pp. 223–224.
- 32.
This could be connected to the Tractarian emphasis, and Burne-Jones’ attraction to a more ritualistic form of liturgy and worship.
- 33.
‘The Creed of S. Athanasius’, The Book of Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David Pointed as they are to be sung or said in Churches 1662 (Cambridge: John Baskerville, 1762), pp. 24–25.
- 34.
Athanasius, ‘On the Incarnation of the Word’, in Bart D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs, eds., Christianity in Late Antiquity 300–450 C.E.: A Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 200. Indeed, Athanasius was a key figure in John Henry Newman and Tractarian thought. See Athanasius, Historical Tracts of St. Athanasius trans. Miles Atkinson with preface and notes by Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1848); John Henry Newman, trans., Select Treatises of S. Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, In Controversy with the Arians (Oxford, London and Cambridge: James Parker and Co. and Rivingtons, 1877); John Henry Newman, Arians of the Fourth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908).
- 35.
John Henry Newman, ‘Sermon II: The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religions Respectively’ preached 13 April 1830, Easter Tuesday, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843 3rd ed. (London, Oxford and Cambridge: Rivingtons, 1872), p. 26.
- 36.
A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle – A Catalogue (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 1–2.
- 37.
Destroyed; a second version was produced by Powell and Son’s for the Church of Saint Patrick in Trim, Country Meath, Ireland, 1869 (Christian and Wildman, Edward Burne-Jones (1998), p. 57).
- 38.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, quoted in ibid., pp. 56–57.
- 39.
Ibid., pp. 6–7.
- 40.
While these ideas would not have been the theological precedent at a Congregational church, Burne-Jones’ own study of theology would have lent him familiarity with the potency of these symbols and ideas; he was known to have ‘devoured’ Robert Wilberforce’s controversial book The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist at mealtimes (Burne-Jones, The Memorials, Vol. 1 (1905), pp. 89–90).
- 41.
Burne-Jones, The Memorials, Vol. 1 (1905), p. 262.
- 42.
Originally published in 1822, The Broad Stone of Honour was republished and revised repeatedly. Since there is no mention of a specific edition or when exactly Burne-Jones acquired them initially, the 1844 edition seems like it would have been easily accessible to him within the timeframe of his readings in his youth, his adulthood, and his subsequent painting of The Merciful Knight (See Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), Footnote 37, p. 286).
- 43.
Kenelm Digby, quoted by Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (London: John Murray Ltd, 1981), p. 20.
- 44.
See, for instance, Charles Kingsley, one of the main proponents of this outlook and antagonistic to Newman and the Tractarians, in his sermon on ‘England’s Strength’, Sermons for the Times (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1898). In Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Donald E. Hall analyses this particular strain in Victorian thought and literature. See also Peter Gray on ‘The Manliness of Christ’ in R. W. Davis and R. J. Helmstadter, eds., Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society. Essays in Honor of R. K. Webb (New York and London, Routledge, 1992).
- 45.
Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice and the Great War (2004), pp. 130–131.
- 46.
Burne-Jones, The Memorials, Vol. 2 (1905), p. 56.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 48.
Crook, William Burges (1981), p. 20.
- 49.
Ruskin, quoted in ibid., p. 21.
- 50.
Digby, quoted in Frantzen, Bloody Good (2004), p. 132.
- 51.
Christian and Wildman, Edward Burne-Jones (1998), p. 93.
- 52.
Burne-Jones, ‘Mr. Ruskin’s New Volume’ (1856), pp. 223–224.
- 53.
Burne-Jones to Thomas Matthew Rooke, Memoirs of Thomas Matthews Rooke: typescript: or Notes of conversations among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1890–1899. MSL/1988/7, Victoria and Albert Museum: National Art Archive, p. 22.
- 54.
Burne-Jones, The Memorials, Vol. 2 (1905), p. 159.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 160.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 160.
- 57.
Burne-Jones to Julia (Cartwright) Any, 1890–7, MS 3264 (ff. 13–43), Beloe Papers (Lambeth Palace Library).
- 58.
Eleizer Shore, ‘The Tree at the Heart of the Garden’, Parabola: The Tree of Life 14:3 (August 1989), p. 39; Lee M. Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 2–4; p. 10; p. 60; Paul Jordan-Smith, ‘The Serpent and the Eagle’, Parabola: The Tree of Life, pp. 64–71.
- 59.
Burne-Jones, The Memorials, Vol. 2 (1905), p. 159.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 257.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 64.
Laura Cumming, ‘Edward Burne-Jones Review – An Endless Procession of the Living Dead’, The Guardian, 22 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/28/edward-burne-jones-tate-britain-review-laura-cumming, accessed June 2022.
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Hinzman, K. (2023). ‘The Loveliest Traditions of the Christian Legend’: Ruskin, Burne-Jones, and the Imaging of the Cross. In: Beaumont, S., Thiele, M.E. (eds) John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21554-4_7
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