Notes
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These fifteen watercolours are faithful copies of miniatures in one of the most sumptuous late fifteenth-century Flemish manuscripts in the British Library (Harley 4425). Le Roman de la Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris about 1230 and completed by Jean de Meun some forty-five years later, was among the most popular secular texts of the late Middle Ages. A meditation on the nature and vicissitudes of love cast in allegorical form, it was also considered controversial, its sensuous language and imagery often being condemned by contemporary moralists. Some three hundred manuscript copies of the text survive, but none is more splendid than the one from which the present copies were made.
The book dates from the last decade of the 15th Century and was executed in Bruges to a commission from Engelbert II, Count of Nassau (1451-1504), an important patron and book-collector of the day. It is unusual in that very few manuscripts of the Roman were produced in the Low Countries at this date, and in fact the text relies not on another manuscript but on a printed edition of 1487. The four large and eighty-eight small miniatures are attributed to the Master of the Prayer Books of around 1500, who also illuminated other texts for Engelbert II. They conjure up a picturesque and highly-coloured world that is perfectly attuned to the poem's celebration of courtly love. Figures dressed in the height of contemporary fashion, reflecting the lavish taste of the Burgundian court under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, disport themselves in elegant walled gardens or what a recent commentator calls 'lush green landscapes, from which handsome trees reach into open skies populated only by wheeling birds'. In 1726 the book was bought at auction in London by that insatiable bibliophile Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford (1689-1741), and it was among the manuscripts that were sold by his descendants to the British Museum in 1755.
William Burges (1827-1881), who commissioned the copies in 1855 at the age of twenty-eight, was one of the most original, not to say eccentric, exponents of the Gothic Revival. Inspired as a youth by Pugin and successively articled to Edward Blore and Matthew Digby Wyatt, he evolved a highly idiosyncratic style informed by his passion for the architecture of thirteenth-century France and his encyclopaedic knowledge of medieval arts and crafts, much of it gained during extensive foreign travels. Illuminated manuscripts were central to his vision, ministering to his sense of the total integration of architecture, painting and the decorative arts, and his strong partiality for colour, detail and excess. They also influenced his technical self-expression. As early as about 1840, when he was still only thirteen, he was practicing illumination in his letters and a painted calendar (sold Christie's, South Kensington, 6 July 2006, lots 8-9). His mature drawing style was profoundly influenced by the vigorous draughtsmanship of Wilars de Honecort.
As a man of means, Burges was able to buy the manuscripts he loved so much, eventually forming a fine collection. He also studied them intently in the British Museum, the Bodleian Library and elsewhere. He may have discovered the Harley Roman de la Rose through Henry Shaw's Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages, published by William Pickering in 1843. A magnificent example of Gothic Revival typography and design, Shaw's book reproduces several of the manuscript's miniatures, and we know that Burges owned a copy at an early date. Whatever the case, by 1850 he was familiar with the manuscript itself, from which, either then or later, he was to make copies (see J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, London, 1981, pp. 63 and 353, notes 43 and 45).
Evidently, however, he felt the need for a more professional record, and our copies are the result. The commission is noted in his diary for 1855 (British Library): 'Had illumination done from Roman de la Rose'. Burges was a keen student of costume, and one of the manuscript's main attractions for him must have been the illuminator's delight in extravagant contemporary dress. More generally, it provided abundant inspiration for the symbolism, anecdote and rich polychromy that he loved to bring to his architecture and decorative design. Nowhere are these passions more vividly displayed than in his painted furniture, and it is no accident that one of the most famous and spectacular examples, the so-called Yatman Cabinet (Victoria and Albert Museum), is listed almost immediately after the copies from the Roman de la Rose in his diary for 1855.
Burges's affection for the manuscript was shared by the Pre-Raphaelites, with whose aims he identified closely and many of whom he knew well. He had been at school with the Rossetti brothers, and in the late 1850s was on intimate terms with the whole circle, meeting them frequently at the short-lived Medieval Society and the only slightly less transient Hogarth Club. He also put work their way. Several of the artists contributed panels to his painted furniture, and Burne-Jones designed stained glass for his restoration of Waltham Abbey (1860-61).
It may in fact have been Burges who fired the Pre-Raphaelites' enthusiasm for Harley 4425, although, like the architect himself, they were devotees of Henry Shaw's Dresses and Decorations, Burne-Jones making copies from the plates and Rossetti appropriating motifs for his quainter and more 'Froissartian' designs. At all events, on 14 April 1860 the artist G.P. Boyce noted in his diary that he, his sister Joanna, and her husband, the portrait painter H.T. Wells, met Burne-Jones 'by appointment at the British Museum, Jones having promised to show us some of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the collection. First the ''Roman de la Rose'', which is filled with the most exquisite illuminations, as fine as could well be in colour and gradation, tenderness of tone and manipulation'. As a specialist in landscape, Boyce particularly appreciated the illuminator's skill in this field. 'The landscapes', he wrote, were 'perfectly enchanting, the distances and skies suggesting Turner's best and showing... close and loving observation of nature'. As for Burne-Jones, the cicerone who obviously knew the book well already, part of its charm lay in the fact that the text had been translated into Middle-English by his hero Chaucer, and represented that amalgam of the erotic and the visionary that always appealed so powerfully to his imagination. Throughout his career he was to find inspiration in the story for pictures and decorative designs, eventually illustrating the whole Chaucerian version for the great edition of the poet's works published by the Kelmscott Press in 1896.
Quite apart from the nature of the text, Burne-Jones was seduced by the extreme picturesqueness of the book's miniatures. As Julian Treuherz wrote in his fascinating article 'The Pre-Raphaelites and Mediaeval Illuminated Manuscripts', 'here was a book not too quaint, combining naturalism with a dreamlike other-worldliness which... made a deep impression' on Burne-Jones and to which 'he returned... a number of times in his work'. Treuherz itemises the borrowings as well as tracing the influence of the manuscript on Rossetti and William Morris, whose layout of the garden at Red House, he suggests, paid conscious homage to the horticultural delights of Harley 4425 (see Leslie Parris (ed.), Pre-Raphaelite Papers, London, 1984, pp. 167-8).
It is unfortunate that, in noting the copies in his diary, Burges did not give a copyist's name. The watercolours are unsigned, and the British Library has no record of anyone copying the manuscript in 1855. It could be that they are the work of a professional copyist. This might account for why he or she is not identified by Burges, and it would certainly explain the copies' extreme proficiency and the way in which the executant seems to deliberately suppress his or her own artistic personality. Nonetheless, the fact that Burges was a gregarious, clubbable man, who knew a large number of artists and often collaborated with them on decorative projects, tempts one to look for the copyist among his circle. Indeed, so numerous were these contacts that at first sight the task seems daunting.
The range of options can, however, be significantly reduced. Obviously we are looking for someone with whom Burges was in touch by 1855 (many of his artistic partnerships came later), and who was capable of such painstaking and self-effacing work. This immediately rules out certain candidates. D.G. Rossetti, for example, though he had known Burges since boyhood, totally lacked the patience, objectivity and technical finesse to carry out such a task. Burne-Jones could not have met Burges before 1856 at the earliest, that being the year when he left Oxford, set himself up as Rossetti's most ardent follower, and entered the Pre-Raphaelite orbit. Moreover, his style as a copyist, first revealed when he sketched murals and easel paintings under Ruskin's influence in Italy in 1859, is poles apart from that of the present watercolours. As for Boyce, we do not know if he and Burges were in touch by 1855; the earliest reference to the architect in Boyce's diary dates from December 1857, when both men had rooms at 15 Buckingham Street, Adelphi, running south from the Strand. But in any case Boyce could not have been the copyist since he had clearly not seen Harley 4425 before Burne-Jones introduced it to him in April 1860.
Other names are more promising. We might, for example, consider the claims of Frederick Smallfield (1829-1915). A genre painter working in a quasi-Pre-Raphaelite style, he had been Burges's fellow pupil in Digby Wyatt's office, and was to carry out decorative work for him over many years. Another possibility is Edward Poynter (1836-1919), the future President of the Royal Academy. He too had known Burges from an early date, having met him through his father, the architect Ambrose Poynter. They were in Rome together in 1853-4, possibly travelling on to Sicily and certainly returning to North Italy in 1856-7.
But it would be rash to draw conclusions without probing further. Do the copies tally with what (if anything) we know of these artists' capabilities in 1855? If one of them was the executant, would Burges have neglected to mention his name (that, after all, of an old friend) when recording the commission? And what of other artists in Burges's circle, only a few of whom we have touched on here? The fact is that although the copies are a fascinating document, saying much about the intense medievalism that dominated Burges's entire career and profoundly influenced so many of his friends in the 1850s, research has not yet reached a stage where we can attribute them to a specific hand with any degree of certainty.
After Burges's death in 1881, the copies came into the possession of the Leschallas family, which had close links with the Burgeses. John Leschallas, one of the biggest building contractors of the day in London, was godfather to William's sister Mary, and left money to her, William, and their younger brother Alfred Edward in his will. The copies later belonged to Mary herself, who married the Gothic Revival architect Richard Popplewell Pullan, and to her niece Elizabeth Burges, who married George Ormiston, Chief Engineer of the Bombay Harbour Authority. They have remained in Elizabeth's family ever since.
We are grateful to Professor J. Mordaunt Crook, Vivian Davies and Martin Levy for their help in preparing this catalogue entry.
