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Lot Essay
This handsome sketchbook drawing belongs to a series illustrating The Romaunt of the Rose that Burne-Jones made in the mid-1870s as designs for needlework. Begun by Guillaume de Lorris about 1230 and completed by Jean de Meun some forty-five years later, the Romaunt is a meditation on the nature and vicissitudes of love cast in allegorical form. Burne-Jones was a great admirer of a famous manuscript of the Romaunt in the British Museum (Hartley 4425), lavishly illuminated in Bruges at the end of the 15th Century with miniatures that conjure up a picturesque and highly-coloured world in keeping with the poem's celebration of courtly love. However, the text itself was familiar to him mainly through the translation into Middle-English made by Chaucer, whom he had been a devotee of ever since he and his lifelong friend William Morris had discovered him as undergraduates at Oxford in the 1850s.
The opportunity to engage pictorially with the Romaunt occurred in 1874, when Morris was commissioned to decorate Rounton Grange at Northallerton, Yorkshire, a house built two years earlier to designs by Philip Webb for the industrialist Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell (1816-1904). It was one of the Morris firm's most important schemes, including wallpaper, painted ceilings, furniture, and an early example of the carpets that were woven at Merton Abbey from 1881.
The centrepiece was the dining-room, and in particular a needlework frieze with which Morris planned to decorate the upper walls. Illustrating the Romaunt of the Rose, it ran round three sides of the room, reaching to the ceiling. Burne-Jones designed the figures and Morris the backgrounds, while the needlework itself was carried out by Sir Isaac's wife Margaret and their daughters Ada and Florence. It took them eight years, finally being completed in 1882 (William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow).
The drawings made by Burne-Jones for the Rounton Grange frieze are among his very finest. Executed within a few years of his last two visits to Italy (1871 and 1873), they vividly reflect these formative experiences in their use of hard pencil and sharp line. The present sheet is a preliminary study for the figure of Love in the pairing of Love and Beauty at the centre of The Pilgrim in the Garden of Idleness tapestry. Burne-Jones habitually made nude studies of his figures in order to understand the movement of the body before later adding clothes and drapery. There is a larger clothed study of the pairing in a private collection.
The opportunity to engage pictorially with the Romaunt occurred in 1874, when Morris was commissioned to decorate Rounton Grange at Northallerton, Yorkshire, a house built two years earlier to designs by Philip Webb for the industrialist Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell (1816-1904). It was one of the Morris firm's most important schemes, including wallpaper, painted ceilings, furniture, and an early example of the carpets that were woven at Merton Abbey from 1881.
The centrepiece was the dining-room, and in particular a needlework frieze with which Morris planned to decorate the upper walls. Illustrating the Romaunt of the Rose, it ran round three sides of the room, reaching to the ceiling. Burne-Jones designed the figures and Morris the backgrounds, while the needlework itself was carried out by Sir Isaac's wife Margaret and their daughters Ada and Florence. It took them eight years, finally being completed in 1882 (William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow).
The drawings made by Burne-Jones for the Rounton Grange frieze are among his very finest. Executed within a few years of his last two visits to Italy (1871 and 1873), they vividly reflect these formative experiences in their use of hard pencil and sharp line. The present sheet is a preliminary study for the figure of Love in the pairing of Love and Beauty at the centre of The Pilgrim in the Garden of Idleness tapestry. Burne-Jones habitually made nude studies of his figures in order to understand the movement of the body before later adding clothes and drapery. There is a larger clothed study of the pairing in a private collection.