Burne -Jones seems to have suffered ill health in his earli- est years as an artist — the use of oil paints apparently made him unwell — and his first completed works were elabo- rate pen-and-ink drawings, often on vellum, taken to a high degree of finish with the most minutely observed detail. They thus display the twin influences of Rossetti, who had made similar drawings in the early 1850s, and John Ruskin, whose practical manual The Elements of Drawings published in 1857, advocated exactly such a devotion to detail and finish. After a first design of 1856, The Waxen Image (where- abouts unknown), and a few other experiments in the medium, Burne-Jones began a series of romantic medieval subjects in which many of his later preoccupations, and his natural abilities as a deco- rative artist, make their first appearance. Although they use the same compression of two- dimensional space for their overall effect, Burne-Jones s drawings differ from Rossetti s medievalizing watercolors of 1857 (such as The Blue Closet and The Tune of Seven Towers, in the Tate Gallery, London) in having outdoor settings. The figures in both The Knights Farewell and Going to the Battle are shown in enclosed gardens. In the latter, such is the density of patternmaking that the mounted knights in the back- ground can only just be dis- cerned. The courtier in The Knights Farewell reads from a book inscribed "Roman du Quete du Sangrail, "which acts as a reminder of the artist's recent participation in the scheme of Arthurian murals at the Oxford Union Society. The favorite motif of a frieze of knights with spears or ban- ners — reused in the Saint Frideswide cartoons (see cat. no. 9), Chant d* Amour (cat. no. 84), and the Holy Grail tapestries (cat. no. 148) — becomes clearer in Going to the Battle, one of the most sophisticated of the entire series, where the full- length female figures cleverly bind together the layered composition. Burne-Jones s delight in decorative detail is evi- dent not only in the effective naturalistic depiction of a par- rot on its perch but also in the inventive design of doves, dogs, and fish on the central figure's dress. It has been sug- gested that both this drawing and Rossetti s watercolor Before the Battle (1857-58; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) may have been inspired by Morris's poem "The Sailing of the Sword," from his first book of verse, The Defence of Guenevere, published in March 1858, in which three courtly ladies bid farewell to their knights. 1 The other important pen-and-ink drawings of this type are Kings' Daughters (1858; private collection) 2 and Sir Galahad (1858; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.), 3 in which the knight on horseback in sharp profile strongly recalls Albrecht Diirer's engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1517), which Burne-Jones would have known by this date. In a letter of February 1857 to William Bell Scott, Rossetti appropriately commended Burne-Jones's ink drawings as "marvels in finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything except perhaps Albert Diirer's finest work." 4 1. Victoria and Albert Museum 1996, p. 101. 2. Arts Council 1975-76, no. 14. 3. Fogg Art Museum 1946, no. 5. 4. Quoted in John Christian, "Early German Sources for Pre-Raphaelite Designs," Quarterly 36 (1973), p. 64, where the Pre-Raphaelites' inter- est in Durer's work is fully discussed
In the right-hand margin are three monograms: for William Holman Hunt, Christina Rossetti (or Dante Gabriel Charles Rossetti) & John Everett Millais (as far as I can see only the Holman Hunt monogram is the one used by the artist) and a sketch for the Angel in the centre background of the pen and ink drawing.