The sitter was the daughter of Sir Augustus Berkeley Paget, a career diplomat. She was christened Alberta Victoria Sarah Caroline, but was always known as Gay. Her mother, Walburga, Lady Paget, was German; the daughter of a Saxon count, she had been the Countess Hohenthal before her marriage in i860, and was a close friend of Queen Victorias eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who became Empress of Germany. A handsome and rather formidable woman, Lady Paget published a series of reminiscences, much adorned with photographs of herself, which are a valuable record of the time. She was genuinely interested in art and had a certain talent herself, having been trained as a young woman by an adherent of the Nazarene school. She was also a great taker-up of causes and fads, including vegetarianism. Both this and her artistic proclivities were inherited by her daughter. Gay Paget met her future husband, Robert George Windsor- Clive, 14th Baron Windsor, in 1880 in Rome, where her father was then ambassador. They were married in London three years later, enjoying a fashionable society wedding at Saint Pauls Church, Knightsbridge. Born in 1857, Lord Windsor had inherited his title from his grandmother at the age of twelve and was a man of considerable culture and taste. When he met Gay in Rome in 1880 he was on his way to Greece to draw the illustrations to a travel book, A Tour in Greece (1882), by his friend Richard Farrer. In due course he would bring his knowl- edge of art and architecture to the government post of First Commissioner of Works and a trusteeship of the National Gallery, while in 1903 he published a pioneering book on the landscape painter John Constable (1776 -1837), f° r many years the standard work on the subject. Clearly their mutual inter- est in art was a great bond between him and Gay, and no doubt too he appreciated her beauty. Tall and slim, with copper lights in her dark hair, she was noted for her shyness, her silence, and her habitually pensive expression. Lord Windsor was a wealthy man, owning some 30,500 acres, and within a year of their marriage he and Gay were cre- ating a vast neo-Jacobean mansion, Hewell Grange, near Redditch in Worcestershire, while an equally ambitious London house was rising in Mount Street, Mayfair. Set in extensive formal gardens, Hewell was modeled on Montacute House, a genuine Renaissance palace in Somerset, but it was furnished eclectically in a variety of styles. While some rooms were Tudor or Jacobean, in keeping with the exterior, others were Italianate, Louis XVI, or even Japanese in taste. Burne-Jones's portrait of the young chatelaine was intend- ed to add the final touch to this great ensemble. That he was chosen to carry out such an important and sensitive task is hardly surprising. No doubt it was felt that the leading expo- nent of female beauty in its most spiritualized form would be sure to do justice to the sitter s ethereal charms; also, perhaps, that a painter who so openly acknowledged a debt to the Italian Old Masters was bound to produce something that would harmonize with its neo-Renaissance surroundings. Lady Paget tells us that she had known Burne-Jones since "the early seventies, [when] he was painting 'Laus Veneris' [cat. no. 63]. … His paintings had for me, in those days, a glamour I cannot express. I trembled when I looked at them and could not for days think of anything else." 1 The Windsors, moreover, belonged to the social set known as the Souls, which came to prominence in the 1880s and were noted for their interest in intellectual and artistic matters rather than the sporting activities that engrossed so many members of the English upper classes. Burne-Jones was their favorite painter, and many of his friends, patrons, and admirers in later life were drawn from their ranks. Burne-Jones was a reluctant portraitist at the best of times, and his likeness of Lady Windsor is truly unique; it is his only full-length and the only attempt he ever made to produce something approaching a conventional society portrait. On the one hand, it clearly sets out to meet more fashionable por- trait painters on their own ground. G. F. Watts, for example, had painted a sumptuous full-length of Mrs. Percy Wyndham, a senior figure in the Souls' circle, in the late 1860s (private col- lection), while John Singer Sargent was to make her three daugh- ters the subject of one of his most swagger performances in 1899 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). 2 At the same time, Burne-Jones not only eschews all the sensuous and theatrical qualities that are the essence of society portraiture but seems to go out of his way to interpret the genre in the most bleak and puritanical terms. The forms of the figure and dress are pared to the minimum, color is drained to near monochrome, and the model is shown looking down so that any possibility of engage- ment with the spectator, the source of so much dramatic poten- tial, is precluded. As two recent biographers of the Souls have written, it is impossible to equate this austere image with "the glittering figure described by Lady Paget, . . . dancing until three in the morning In a grey and gold shot satin gown, a tiara of emeralds and diamonds with a matching necklace. …' " 3 The Souls loved Burne-Jones for his spirituality, and in commissioning him to paint a full-length likeness of his wife, Lord Windsor was inviting him to create the quintessential portrait to emerge from this rare accommodation between society and progressive art. Nor did the artist produce anything less; if one picture sums up the ideals and aspirations of the coterie, it is undoubtedly this. But Burne-Jones had now reached a stage in his development so extreme that there is a sense in which he goes beyond his patrons' enlightened aes- theticism, using the commission to explore the private world with which his late paintings are essentially concerned. In the last resort, comparison with Watts or Sargent, how- ever tempting in view of the circumstances surrounding the commission, is sterile. The picture belongs to a totally different context, that of the Symbolist portrait. It would not look out of place beside the full-length portraits of Whistler, in which the sitters are endowed with an elusive and enigmatic quality by being shown in slightly murky relief against dark or shad- owy backgrounds. A similar approach was adopted by Antonio de la Gandara (1862-1927), a French artist of Spanish descent to whom the critic Albert S amain wrote: "How I adore your women. … You have spiritualised and mysteriously extended their elegance through your art, transforming them into a dream." 4 Then there is the question of Burne-Jones's relation- ship with the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand KhnopfF (1858-1921), who visited him in London, exchanged drawings with him, and wrote his obituary for the Magazine of Art. Burne-Jones's influence on Khnopff is often noted, but it has also been suggested that the portrait of Lady Windsor depends on a portrait that KhnopfF painted of his sister in 1887. 5 There are certainly remarkable similarities in the conception of the figure and the background forms, but perhaps it is not so much a case of borrowing as a matter of two pictures belonging to a common convention. The portrait of Lady Windsor is dated 1893, but according to Burne-Jones's work record he did not finish it until shortly before it was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1895. With it appeared three other works, including The Wedding of Psyche (cat. no. 41), which shares some of its stylistic traits. By November it was installed at Hewell, where, to her credit, it was much admired by Lady Paget. "Gay's picture by Burne- Jones," she wrote, "now hangs on the staircase. Its blue-green tones harmonise beautifully with the oak panelling. This pic- ture, one of the rare portraits he has ever painted, has been much abused by the critics. Gay is more beautiful, but the entire impression recalls her infinitely well to her best friends." 6 Lady Paget was right when she said that the picture had been "much abused by the critics." The acclaim Burne-Jones had enjoyed when he exhibited such pictures as The Garden of Pan (cat. no. 120) and The Tower of Brass (cat. no. 121) in the late 1880s was quick to evaporate as he entered the uncompromis- ing and highly personal world of the portrait of Lady Windsor and The Wedding of Psyche, Even F. G. Stephens could not fol- low him here, dismissing the portrait as "rather unfortunate, and somewhat spectral," 7 while the art critic of the Times com- mented that the pictures Burne-Jones was showing this year "seem, from their uniform greyness of colour and from the exaggerated thinness of the figures and the melancholy of the faces, to carry almost too far those idiosyncrasies of sentiment and expression which have belonged to this painter from the beginning. Spirituality in a portrait is an admirable thing, especially in these days when it is so rare; but why pervade a portrait, like that of Lady Windsor, with a world-weariness which would seem to imply that there was no joy left to be drawn either from things of the senses or from the things of the soul?" 8 When Burne-Jones died three years later, the Windsors attended his memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Lady Paget was apparently not present, but she recorded in her jour- nal that the artist's "sudden death was a great blow to us all," and how "he begged that none of his family should wear mourning for him, and at the memorial service , … they all appeared in grey and white, even Lady Burne-Jones." 9 At the studio sale the following month Lord Windsor bought a pic- ture, which suggests that he too was pleased with his wife's portrait, a cloudy affair of angels or spirits so disembodied and abstract that it must have been one of the last things the artist touched (private collection). Such a taste for late Burne-Jones in a connoisseur who was probably already planning a book on Constable is surely remarkable. In 1905 Lord Windsor was raised to the peerage, taking the revived title of Earl of Plymouth. In addition to Hewell, he owned a genuine Elizabethan country house, Saint Fagans Castle, near Cardiff, a mellow and beautiful building set in what George Wyndham described as the "enchanted land of Arthurian romance. "The ownership of these two seats brought the Plymouths many responsibilities. He was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorganshire, Mayor of Cardiff, and Honorary Colonel of the Glamorganshire Yeomanry; she was much involved with the welfare of her tenants and devoted herself to the revival of local arts and crafts. The couple had three sons and a daughter, but the eldest son, Other (a family name), died in India in 1908, while the third, Archer, was killed, like so many sons of the Souls, in the Great War. After her husband's death in 1923, Lady Plymouth left Hewell, which, though no more than forty years old, was already an anachronism in a dramatically changed world. Settling at Painswick in Gloucestershire, she lived a reclusive life until, after twenty years of widowhood and in the middle of another war, she died in August 1944. 10 [jc] 1. Walburga, Lady Paget, In My Tower (London, 1924), vol. 1, pp. 268-69. 2. Both portraits are in private collections; the Sargent, in which the Watts portrait is seen hanging on the wall behind the sitters, is reproduced in Abdy and Gere 1984, p. 100. 3. Ibid., p. 123. 4. French Symbolist Painters (exh. cat., London: Hayward Gallery; Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery [Arts Council], 1972), p. 62, under no. 99. This Portrait of a Woman of 1891 (private collection, Paris) is very compa- rable to the portrait of Lady Windsor in conception. 5. Francine-Claire Legrand, "Fernard Khnopff — Perfect Symbolist," Apollo, April 1967, p. 283. 6. Lady Paget, In My Tower, vol. 1, p. 161. 7. Athenaeum, May 4, 1895, p. 579. 8. Times (London), April 27, 1895, p. 12. 9. Lady Paget, In My Tower, vol. 1, p. 268. 10. A brief obituary appeared in the Times (London), August 23, 1944, p. 7.
... / Now for plans for the week / here is my list of engagements / tomorrow so busy I cannot / see you I know - Ly. Windsor / in early morning - business men / in afternoon - appointments, ...