Painted in 1865 and exhibited at the Old Water-Colour Society the following year, this picture marks the climax of the Venetian tendency in Burne-Jones s early work; in par- ticular, it reflects the type of composition popularized by Giorgione (died 1510) and his followers: a group of figures in a pastoral setting, lacking a strong narrative content but rich in mood, with hints of amorous dalliance and a musical dimen- sion to set the emotional tone. Burne-Jones's interest in Venetian sources, shared by so many of his circle at this date, is evident as early as 1859-60 in such works as Buondelmonte's Wedding (cat. no. 7) and Sidonia von Bork (cat. no. 12); but it intensified following his three-week stay in Venice in the sum- mer of 1862, during which he made copies of Venetian paint- ings for his mentor John Ruskin. As he later told his assistant T. M. Rooke, he came back from Venice "thinking there could be no painting in the world but Carpaccio's and the other Venetians." 1 Giorgionesque paintings are represented among Burne- Jones's early copies, for example, The Rich Mans Feast by Bonifazio (1487— 1553), which he noted in the Accademia, Venice, in 1862. 2 But the picture of this type which probably impressed him most was the so-called Concert Champetre in the Louvre, then given to Giorgione himself but now considered to be an early work by his associate Titian. This celebrated pic- ture had inspired a sonnet by Rossetti in 1849, and Burne-Jones probably saw it on visits to the Louvre in 1855, 1859, and 1862. It was primarily the influence of Giorgione, sanctioning an emphasis on atmosphere at the expense of narrative and encouraging the use of musical reference, that enabled Burne- Jones to make such a major contribution to the cult of Aestheticism as it emerged in the 1860s. Music, according to Walter Pater in his essay "The School of Giorgione" (1877), was the art toward which all the others should "constantly aspire" in their search for formal perfection, and an interesting table could be drawn up, listing the artists involved according to whether they were genuinely musical or only paid lip service to this ideal. Rossetti and Whistler, though major players, had little musical awareness, but Frederic Leighton, Walter Crane, Henry Holiday, and Simeon Solomon, to name but four, were all genuine devotees. None, however, was more so than Burne- Jones. His taste was catholic; we hear of his being "enraptured" by Meyerbeer 3 and thrilled by Wagner, but it was early and tra- ditional music that excited him most. He himself was not a performer, although he is said to have kept a small organ in his studio, but several in his circle were. One was Peter Paul Marshall, a rather inactive partner of the Morris firm, who would regale his friends with musical renderings of "Clerk Saunders," "Sir Patrick Spens," and other Scottish ballads. 4 Another was the artist and musicologist Henry Ellis Wooldridge, later Slade Professor at Oxford. "He introduced us," wrote Georgie Burne-Jones in her account of the year 1866, "to a new world of beauty in Italian songs of the seventeenth century — then almost entirely unknown — and his singing of Carissimi and Stradella gave us the keenest pleasure: Edward used to ask him for the same things over and over again." 5 But it was Georgie herself who provided most of the music that Burne-Jones found so inspiring. She was a talented pianist and had a good singing voice, as many of her friends bore wit- ness. The artist William Bell Scott recorded her singing "the ballad of 'Green Sleeves' and others in loud wild tones, quite novel and charming." 6 "Mrs Jones," wrote G. P. Boyce after an evening at The Grange in April 1869, "sang several things of Gliick and Beethoven and Schubert, and charmed us in this way till nearly 1 o'clock." 7 A similar account was left by the Burne-Joneses' American friend Charles Eliot Norton. "Mrs Jones," he told a correspondent the same year, "has a pleasant voice, pleasantly cultivated — and her music is of a rare sort, and not of the modern but of the former better English school. She will sing for an hour delightfully from Haydn, from Cherubini, from Bach, or will turn from these composers to the lighter style of the old Shakespearian and Ben Jonson songs, or the still older English airs and French chansons. At the piano she sings as one of Stothard's beauties ought to." 8 Le Chant d* Amour takes its title from the refrain of an old Breton song, probably one that figured in Georgie s repertoire: Helaslje sais un chant d' amour, Triste ou gai, tour a tour. Certainly the design was conceived as part of the decoration of a small upright piano, made by F. Priestley of Berners Street, London, in unpolished American walnut, which was given to the Burne-Joneses as a wedding present in i860 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Painted in monochrome on the inside of the lid, probably about 1863, the composition at this stage included only the lady playing the organ and the figure of Cupid, or Love, at the bellows. When the present watercol- or was painted a year or two later, the figures were refined and modified, a lovesick knight in armor was added at the left, and a landscape setting filled the background with romantic "Arthurian" buildings and the foreground with wallflowers and tulips. The following year, 1866, another version was painted, omitting the figure of Cupid, 9 and in 1868 the large, definitive version was started in oils, being completed in 1877 (cat. no. 84). Meanwhile, the composition had made yet another appear- ance, in a highly personal context which speaks volumes for its significance for Burne-Jones. It is reduced to miniature pro- portions in an illuminated manuscript placed in the hands of the artist's mistress, Maria Zambaco, in the portrait he painted of her in 1870 (cat. no. 49). The present watercolor was one of the first pictures by Burne-Jones to be acquired by William Graham (fig. 70), who, like his rival collector F R. Leyland (fig. 69), was first attracted to Burne-Jones's work at the Old Water- Colour Society, to which the artist was elected in 1864. A Scot of strict evangeli- cal faith, Graham had made a fortune as an India merchant and belonged to the Liberal establishment, entering Parliament as a close ally of W. E. Gladstone in 1865. He was to become not only Burne-Jones's staunchest patron but a close friend and trusted adviser; indeed, during the last years of Grahams life he effectively acted as his agent, negotiating the sale of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (cat. no. 112) to Lord Wharncliffe and of the Briar Rose paintings (cat. nos. 55-58) to Agnew's. Graham also had an important influence on Burne-Jones's development. It was typical of him that he bought Le Chant d Amour as he particularly liked this kind of composition, Venetian in concept, rich in color, romantic or elegiac in mood. His consistent interest in acquiring such works ensured that Burne-Jones's art retained a Venetian dimension long after the focus of his interest had moved to Florentine, Byzantine, and other visual sources. Le Chant d Amour the more important of two pictures that Burne-Jones showed at the OWCS in 1866, and it attract- ed the usual criticism that his work evoked at this date. Everyone agreed that his sense of color was remarkable, but his drawing was considered weak and the sentiment expressed was regarded as elitist, escapist, and morbid. "Only those who have fed their eyes and minds on medieval pictures and poems are like- ly to admire or appreciate such drawings as 'Le Chant d 'Amour,'" wrote Tom Taylor in the Times. "Mr Jones s work," he continued, is the result of a passionate study of Dante and the Morte d* Arthur, early glass painting and medieval missal w r ork, all grafted on Giorgione. The legends and the art of an immature but poetic time have taken entire possession of him, and absolutely compelled to their service the sentiment of a fine colourist, which he unquestionably possesses, while they favour the unskilfulness of an immature draughtsman. . . . Those who feel repelled by the prose and pain of common life are ready to overlook much bad drawing and much positive ugliness of form in the charm that Mr Jones's utterly unreal work exerts over them. There is no reason this kind of taste should not be catered for, but it is well to bear in mind that after all it is but a dilettante cowardice that is forced to retire from real life, its beauty and its ugliness, its joys, sorrows, and interests, to take refuge in these reminiscences of the past. No really creative imagination ever satisfied itself on such husks and echoes. 10 The Art Journal 'went in for heavy sarcasm. "Behold what the good gods have provided for you in the works of Mr Burne Jones!" its critic exclaimed. "Gracious heavens! What profun- dity of thought, what noble teaching, what mystery of loveli- ness are here brought forth for the delight and edification of the elect!" After a swipe at the artist's other contribution, Zephyrus and Psyche (private collection), the writer continued: "But for the worshippers of the supernatural, food still more sustaining to the soul is provided in that marvellous and mysterious conception, 'Le Chant d'Amour.' ... It is simply hopeless to try to touch such performances by criticism. A habeus corpus cannot enter a madhouse. There is no means whereby a work absolutely insane can be brought into the courts of reason." 11 Even the more sympathetic F. G. Stephens, writing in the Athenaeum, had reservations. Having praised "that exquisite gift of colour which places Mr Jones in the front ranks of English Art," he went on to deplore the artist's apparently will- ful quaintness, his "love of conceits in design, such as obtained in the fifteenth century in Italy more than elsewhere, and are opposed to the highest feeling no less than to the purest prac- tice of Art." The detail that particularly irritated Stephens was the "blind Cupid bodily work[ing] the bellows of the organ — too literal a means of expressing an exquisite fancy." 12 It is hard today to appreciate what all the fuss was about, but a glance at the OWCS catalogues goes far to explain it. Most of the exhibitors — Edward Duncan (1803-1882), David Cox, Jr. (1809-1885), William Callow (1812-1908), and the like — were loyal adherents of the English watercolor tradition, focusing their attention on landscape; and although there were artists, such as Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) and John Gilbert (1817-1897), who branched out into romantic sentiment or lit- erary figure subjects, they belonged to an older generation whose style had long since won acceptance. Even most of the up-and-coming younger men — Myles Birket Foster (1825- 1899), G. P. Boyce (1826-1897), and Fred Walker (1840-1875)— were not likely to upset conservative sensibilities, and Burne- Jones himself might have attracted less obloquy if his work had been more retiring. As it was, it not only differed radically in style and inspiration from that of his peers but grabbed the eye by being much stronger in tone and on a much larger scale than the traditional watercolor. Here, in fact, was his greatest offense; his work demanded to be seen and could be placed only in a prominent position. As Stephens wrote of Le Chant d Amour, the picture "occupies the place of honour, . . . and deserves it." 13 No wonder old fogies were upset, and in 1870 they took their revenge by virtually forcing him to resign. At the Graham sale in 1886 Le Chant d 'Amour was bought by Burne-Jones's friend and follower Edward Clifford (1844-1907), who had a particular interest in these early water- colors. He had been among the young artists who, as he put it, were "made captive for ever" by the work Burne-Jones showed at the OWCS in the 1860s, 14 and he later owned a number of examples, while making faithful copies of others. Le Chant d Amour, however, did not stay with him long, as it was in the possession of the Boston collector Martin Brimmer by 1891. [jc] 1. Lago 1981, p. 167. 2. Copy in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 3. Memorials, vol. 1, p. 114. 4. Ibid., p. 238. 5. Ibid., p. 302. 6. William Bell Scott, Autobiographical 'Notes (London, 1892), p. 59. 7. Surtees 1980, p. 50. 8. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (London, 1913), vol. 1, p. 348. A sketch by Burne-Jones of Georgie at the piano is reproduced in Memorials, vol. 1, p. 218; another was sold at Christie's, June 7, 1996, lot 555, illus. 9. Private collection; exhibited Arts Council 1975-76, no. 86. 10. Times (London), May 9, 1866, p. 6. 11. Art Journal, 1866, p. 174. 12. Athenaeum, no. 2010 (May 5, 1866), p. 604. 13. Ibid. 14. [Edward Clifford], Broadlands As It Was (London, 1890), p. 49.
Signed and dated on tablet lower left EBJ 1865 Fitzwilliam work list "1865 le Chant d'Amour - Graham" The flowers in the foreground Tulip- Declaration of Love, Wallflower - fidelity in misfortune ( Phillips 1825). These sentiments reflect the artist's emotional state over his recent meeting with Maria Zambaco, who was to become his mistress.
Lent to the MFA [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] and included in the Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited on the Second Floor, 3d ed., Winter 1887-1888 (Boston, 1888), p. 32, cat. no. 625.