The picture illustrates one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
his collection of narrative poems told by a company of
pilgrims as they make their way to the tomb of Thomas à
Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The story narrated by the
genteel Prioress tells of a seven-year-old Christian boy who
lives with this widowed mother in an Asian city and is devoted
to the Virgin Mary. He learns by heart a hymn in her honor,
"O alma redemptoris mater," and is murdered by some Jews
when he sings as he passes through their ghetto; his throat is
cut and his body thrown into a pit. The Virgin lays a grain of
corn on his tongue, and miraculously he continues to sing her
praises, leading the authorities to discover his corpse and pun-
ish his assassins. His body is placed before the high altar of the
abbey, and the abbot beseeches him to reveal how it is that he
still manages to sing. The boy recounts the miracle, and explains
that when the grain of corn is removed the Virgin will come
for his soul. This is done, and he is given a martyr s burial:

And in a tombe of marbul stones cleere
Enclosen they his litel body sweete.
Ther he is now, God leve us for to meete!

Chaucer was one of the cornerstones of Burne-Jones's and
Morris's medievalism. They first read him as undergraduates
at Oxford, and their last great collaborative venture was the
lavishly illustrated edition of his works issued by the Kelmscott
Press shortly before Morris's death in 1896. Burne-Jones's pic-
ture was in progress for almost as long, and is the most remark-
able example we have of his tendency to develop his pictorial
ideas over long periods of time.

The design was conceived in 1858 as decoration for a wardrobe
(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), the subject perhaps being con-
sidered suitable because this is a word (in the sense of "privy")
that Chaucer uses in describing the disposal of his hero's body.
Designed by Philip Webb and exhibited at the Hogarth Club
that year, the wardrobe was given to William and Jane Morris
when they married in April 1859. It stood in their bedroom at
Red House and later adorned the drawing room at Kelmscott
House, their London home from 1879. Meanwhile, the present
picture had been started - in 1865 according to the date it bears
but in 1869 according to Burne-Jones's autograph work record
(Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). It was commissioned by
William Graham, but Burne-Jones's decision to repeat the
composition at this date may also reflect Ruskin's theory about
"constant" art and "dramatic" art, particularly his belief that
artists had a moral duty to paint elevating subjects and to sup-
press horrific incidents which, by appealing to man's morbid
love of the sensational, had a socially harmful effect. Ths chief
expression of this doctrine in Burne-Jones's work is Saint
Theophilus and the Angel (fig. 66), a watercolor of 1863-67 in
which the miraculous and iconographically attractive results of
a martyrdom are seen in the foreground while the execution
itself is relegated to the middle distance, A similar approach is
found in The Prioress's Tale, where the focus is on what Ruskin
would have called the "beautiful circumstance" of the Virgin
placing the grain of corn on the boy's tongue, while the "harm-
fully dramatic" scene of his being seized by the murderous Jews
is played down in the background on the right. That the pic-
tures both have urban settings in which statues of pagan deities
figure prominently tends to underline the connection.

Whatever the case, The Prioress's Tale hung fire. William
Graham, who died in 1885, never received it, and it was taken
up only at the end of Burne-Jones s life when, aware that his
reputation was declining and that unfinished pictures would
be a burden to his heirs, he was anxious to complete old work.
Though suffering from influenza, he worked on it during the
early months of 1898 and finished it in mid- April. It was then
immediately sent to the New Gallery, where it was still on
exhibition when he died on June 16. The art critic of the Times
described it as "very quaintly composed, and with a great deal
of invention and interesting detail." 1 F. G. Stephens, writing in
the Athenaeum, commented as follows: "The chief charms of
the picture are the noble and gentle demeanour of the Virgin,
clad in a lovely blue and purple, and the sweetness and har-
mony of the whole scene, where even the effect (a glowing twi-
light) emphasises the sentiment. In other respects the picture
is by no means a masterpiece." 2 Burne-Jones had been con-
cerned that, like other late works, the picture would fail to sell,
but shordy before its exhibition it was bought by a new patron,
Lady Colville, after she had "fussed about it for some time." 3
The picture was shown again, together with The Dream of
Launcelot (cat. no. 162), at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in
1900. This was the last occasion until recent times that his work
was seen in the city where he had enjoyed such popularity in the
early 1890s.

Burne-Jones must have repainted the picture extensively in
1898, since nearly all the surface work seems to date from this
period and the style reveals many of his later mannerisms. The
picture is, however, much brighter in color than many works
of the 1890s, which show a strong tendency to be almost
monochromatic. In earlier days he had always been admired as
a colorist, even by his sternest critics, and the new trend was
not popular. The Times complained about it in 1895 (see cat.
no. 161); Graham Robertson, who attributed it to the influence
of the artist's son, Philip, thought it deplorable; 4 and Burne-
Jones himself noted with a certain irritation that friends
"turned" from The Dream of Launcelot, one of the most somber
of his later works, to the "brighter" Aurora (Queensland Art
Gallery, Brisbane) when they saw them together in the studio. 5
The moral was obvious, especially in view of his anxiety about
selling his pictures, and it may be that The Prioress s Tale marks
a conscious attempt at this very late stage of his career to revert
to a more appealing palette. In this particular case, however,
there was possibly a further reason. His assistant T. M. Rooke,
who helped him with certain details of the picture, recorded
that his master worked on it pardy at Rottingdean, his country
retreat on the Sussex coast, and was dismayed when he saw it
in the brilliant seaside light. 6 The unusually bright and vivid
tones may be the result of an attempt to paint up to this excep-
tional illumination.

It has been observed that Burne-Jones makes considerable
use of flower symbolism in The Prioress's Tale, the lilies repre-
senting purity, the poppies consolation, the sunflowers adora-
tion, and the wallflowers fidelity in adversity. 7 However, he was
also well aware of the formal values of these flowers, observing
that they "come at intervals like those in a tune," and "hum-
ming as he pointed to one after the other." 8 The comment is
an interesting echo of the idea, so fashionable during the
Aesthetic period, that art (as Walter Pater had put it) "con-
stantly aspires towards the condition of music."

Several studies for the picture are recorded, including one
for the Virgin, dating from the early phase of work in the late
1860s, 9 and one for the head of the boy, dated 1898. 10 The
model for this was Edward Horner, the elder son of Burne-
Jones s close friend Frances Horner (cat. no. 107) and a grand-
son of his patron William Graham. Born in 1888 and educated
at Eton, Edward was commissioned on the outbreak of war in
1914 and killed at the battle of Cambrai three years later. A
memorial to him, designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens
and bearing an equestrian statue by the painter of horses Sir
Alfred Munnings, is in Mells Church, Somerset. The "Souls,"
the social set of which Frances Horner had been a leading
member, suffered grievously from the deaths of their sons dur-
ing the Great War. Another casualty was Raymond Asquith,
the son of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, who had mar-
ried Edward Horner's sister, Katharine.

Burne-Jones also illustrated "The Prioress's Tale" in the
Kelmscott Chaucer, but the treatment there is different. The
incidents combined in the painting become the subject of two
separate designs, and there are many variations of detail.

[jc]

1. Times (London), April 23, 1898, p. 10.
2. Athenaeum, no. 3680, May 7, 1898, p. 603.
3. T. M. Rooke's notes of conversations in Burne-Jones's studio, unpub-
lished section, p. 535 (National Art Library, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London).
4. Kerrison Preston, ed., Letters from Graham Robertson (London, 1953),
pp. 284, 442.
5. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 258.
6. Rooke's notes, p. 513; see note 3 above. .
7. Delaware Art Museum Collection (1978) 1984, p. 36.
8. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 333.
9. Private collection; Burlington Fine Arts Club 1899, no. 126, and The
Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Draughtsmen (exh. cat., King's Lynn,
Norfolk: Fermoy Art Gallery, 1971), no. 7.
10. Christie's, November 2, 1990, lot 169, illus.

Signed and dated lower left EB-J 1865-98