Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., A.R.A., R.W.S. (1833-1898)
Signed and inscribed 'EBJ to RH' (lower left) and 'Sa Dorothea' (upper right), and further inscribed 'Saint Dorothy given to Rosalind Howard by E.B. Jones' (on an old label on the reverse);
Pencil, black and red chalk, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic, heightened with gold. In its original Frame.
31½ x 15½ in. (80 x 39.4 cm.)
PROVENANCE:
Given by the artist to Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, and thence by descent.
LITERATURE:
Fortunée De Lisle, Burne-Jones, London, 1904, p. 181 ;
A.C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, Yale, 1974-5, vol. 2, p.42;
EXHIBITED:
London, New Gallery, Exhibition of the Works of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1898-9, no. 56.
The picture is based on a decorative design, in this case a light in the east window at All Saints Church, Cambridge, which was built by G.F. Bodley in the early 1860s,. In fact it was almost certainly developed directly on top of the stained-glass cartoon. At this date Burne-Jones would have drawn the cartoon in sepia wash, providing an ideal underpainting for a picture which, though actually in watercolour, uses bodycolour so extensively that it has something of the density of oil. There are a number of other examples of Burne-Jones recycling his early cartoons in this way.
The lowest tier of the window showed five female saints, namely Saints Barbara, Agnes, Radegunda, Dorothy and Catherine. Saints Barbara, Agnes and Dorothy were all to enjoy an afterlife in terms of easel pictures. Both the St Dorothy and the St Agnes cartoons were developed as such, the first resulting in the present picture, the St Agnes in a very comparable work of the same dimensions that was sold at Sotheby's, Belgravia on 24 October 1978, lot 6. It had once been in the enormous collection formed by the soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme. Certainly all three saints were brought together in a picture of the late 1860s painted for the keenest and most perceptive of all Burne-Jones's patrons, William Graham.
Burne-Jones clearly felt that all three of these figures merited reinterpretation in pictorial form, but it was the story of St Dorothy that made the most powerful appeal to his imagination. According to legend, the saint was a maiden of Caesarea in Cappodocia who suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284-305 A.D.) for her Christian faith and her refusal to marry on the grounds that she was already the bride of Christ. On her way to execution one bitterly cold winter morning, she was accosted by the notary Theophilus, who mockingly asked her to send him roses from paradise. When they duly arrived by angelic courier, Theophilus too was converted, and eventually, like St Dorothy was martyred and achieved sainthood.
References to this story are made in our picture by the sword in the Saint's right hand, the instrument of her execution, the infant angel carrying a basket of flowers, and the snow that falls in the sky beyond the curtain. But this was by no means Burne-Jones's last word on the subject. In 1867, a year after the All Saints' window was designed and installed, he exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society an important picture in which the story of St Dorothy's martyrdom was told in narrative form. St Theophilus and the Angel was destroyed during the Second World War, but the composition is known from a Hollyer photograph and a copy by Fairfax Murray. The Saint's execution has just taken place in a town square. In the middle distance a group of female spectators is seen leaving a booth, while the Saint's shrouded body is carried off to the night. In the foreground Theophilus turns into a doorway, as yet unaware that an angel is approaching with the basket of flowers. This figure had matured since Burne-Jones drew his stained-glass cartoon a year earlier, being no longer a putto but a Botticellian adolescent of indeterminate sex.
In fact the legend of St Dorothy enjoyed something of a cult in Burne-Jones's circle at this date. Morris treated it in a discarded story for The Earthly Paradise, the great cycle of narrative poems that he was writing from 1865 and published 1868-70. It also inspired a poem in Swinburne's notorious Poems and Ballads of 1866. There were probably several reasons for this rather curious vogue. Morris no doubt appreciated the sheer narrative potential of such a colourful story. Swinburne, who makes Theophilus St Dorothy's unrequited lover, was characteristically attracted by the element of sadism involved. As for Burne-Jones, while he was closely associated with both these literary projects, making literally hundreds of illustrations for The Earthly Paradise and accepting the dedication of Poems and Ballads, his interest in the story was inextricably bound up with Ruskin's ongoing attempt to shape his development.
The picture was given by Burne-Jones to Rosalind Howard, who became Countess of Carlisle when her husband, George Howard succeeded to the title as the ninth Earl in 1889. They had married in 1864, when George was twenty-one and Rosalind nineteen. In later years Rosalind was to become a tiresome and domineering figure, quarrelling with everyone who did not share her passionate belief in women's suffrage, temperance, and Irish home rule. Eventually her marriage itself suffered, and in the late 1880s she and George drifted apart. But twenty years earlier it had seemed as if they had nothing but a golden prospect before them. As their friend Sidney Colvin recalled, 'no more exceptional or attractive young couple gathered about them in those days a more varied company of talents and distinctions, whether in art, literature or politics'.
In April 1867 Rosalind recorded in her diary that they had seen Burne-Jones's 'picture of Dorothy' (Ridgway, p.8), but this was almost certainly St Theophilus and the Angel, finished and about to go on exhibition at the Old Watercolour Society. In fact there are several hints that our picture remained in Burne-Jones's studio until 1881, when the Howards' ninth child, a girl, was born. She was called Dorothy, so not only would the picture have been an appropriate present but we might have a reason why it was presented specifically to her mother. A further link with the Burne-Joneses may lie in the fact that the infant's second name was Georgiana, as if Rosalind was calling her after one of her closest friends. Could it even be that Georgie Burne-Jones was a godmother? Finally, there is the evidence of the inscriptions on the picture itself. They are written in a style that strongly suggests that they were added in the early 1880s.
Burne-Jones died suddenly in June 1898, and that winter St Dorothy, together with the great Annunciation and four other works, was lent by the Howards to the artist's memorial exhibition at the New Gallery in Regent Street. George died in 1911 and Rosalind a decade later. After her death her daughter gave the Cupid and Psyche frieze to the Birmingham Art Gallery, while the Annunciation was sold at Sotheby's in June 1922, subsequently entering the Leverhulme collection and ending up in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight. Other works, however, remained in family possession, whether, like the Castle Howard windows or the reliefs at Lanercost and Naworth, they were built into ancestral properties, or descended to George and Rosalind's numerous heirs. Among the latter was St Dorothy, a monument to one of the most fruitful friendships in late Victorian art as well as to a particularly significant moment in the career of Burne-Jones himself.
This resume is an extract of the full catalogue entry which was provided by John Christian, one of the most distinguished scholars of Burne Jones. The complete entry is available on request.
St Dorothy
