Sir EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, A.R.A.
(1833-1898)
 

Childe Roland

1861

pen and ink and wash on paper, 43 x 24 cm

inscribed: EBJ 1861        

            CHILDE.ROLAND.TO.THE.DARK.TOWER.CAME

P.727

Childe Roland is the last and one of the largest of the pen and ink drawings that Burne-Jones made at the outset of his career, that is to say between 1856, when he left Oxford and started to work under the guidance of D.G. ROSSETTI, and 1861, when watercolour took over as his primary medium of expression. Meticulously finished and replete with romantic feeling for the Middle Ages, these drawings form a close parallel both to Rossetti’s contemporary watercolours with ‘chivalric Froissartian themes’, and with William Morris’s first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere (1858). Technically they owe much to the engravings of Albrecht Dürer. Indeed Rossetti described them in 1857 as ‘marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer’s finest works’.

Childe Roland illustrates the well-known poem by Robert Browning (1812-89), Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, published in Men and Women in 1855. Taking its title from words spoken by Edgar when feigning madness in King Lear (Act III, Scene 4), the poem describes a young knight’s journey through a nightmarish landscape to reach a mysterious Dark Tower. He succeeds where many before him have failed, and the poem ends with the ‘dauntless’ hero putting a ‘slug-horn’ to his lips and blowing a challenge. This is the subject of Burne-Jones’s drawing.

At this period Browning still suffered from public neglect, his work being considered difficult, but despite, or perhaps because of this, he was passionately admired by Rossetti, Burne-Jones and their circle. Rossetti introduced Burne-Jones to Browning in July 1856. Browning, Burne-Jones wrote the following year, was ‘the deepest and intensest of all poets’, and they met again in Italy in 1859, Burne-Jones probably benefiting from Browning’s knowledge of Italian pictures. Nonetheless, the relationship between the drawing and its literary source is complex. While the mood of Browning’s poem is deeply introspective, Burne-Jones adopts a heraldic, decorative approach, even introducing a gravity-defying scroll inscribed with the title. Equally, he replaces the poem’s terrifyingly barren landscape with nothing less than a riot of sunflowers. In her Memorials, Lady Burne-Jones described how carefully he studied these in preparation for the drawing. In fact Childe Roland is one of the earliest examples of the sunflower motif which was to play such a prominent part in the Aesthetic Movement.

This was one of the first works by Burne-Jones to be acquired by RUSKIN, who played a decisive part in the artist’s early development. Ruskin lent the drawing to Winnington Hall, the girls’ school in Cheshire in which he took such an interest in the 1860s, but when Miss Bell, the headmistress, went bankrupt in 1873, he was unable to reclaim it, and it was probably sold to  raise funds. Later it belonged to F.S. Ellis, who published works by William Morris (1834-96) and ROSSETTI. Ellis remembered buying it at Sotheby’s about 1878 ‘for something between twenty and thirty pounds’.

JC

PROVENANCE: Commissioned by John Ruskin; F.S. Ellis; Arthur West; purchased through Christie’s by Gallery with assistance from the V&A/M.G.C. Purchase Grant Fund and N.A.C.F., September 1983.

EXHIBITIONS: Burne-Jones, London, Hayward Gallery, Southampton, Southampton Art Gallery, & Birmingham, City Museum & Art Gallery, 1975-6, no.22; From Monet to Freud, London, Sotheby’s, 1989, no.1; John Ruskin & the Victorian Eye, Phoenix, Phoenix Art Gallery, & Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1993, no.14; Knights, Chivalry, Romance, Legend, Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, 1995-6, no catalogue.; Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, & Birmingham, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery only, 1998-9, no.14.

REFERENCES: Burne-Jones’s autograph work-record, under 1861 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge); F.S. Ellis, Memories of Men, Places and Things, n.d., pp.7-8, no.6; M. Bell, Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review, 1898,pp.28, 129; F.de Lisle, Burne-Jones, 1904, pp.57, 188; G. Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1904,vol. I, p.225; Old Water-Colour Society’s Club, ‘Extracts from G.P. Boyce’s Diaries’, 19^th Annual Volume, 1941, p.39; M. Harrison and B. Waters, Burne-Jones, 1973, pp.58,61; V. Surtees (ed.), The Diaries of George Price Boyce, 1980, pp.32, 93, note 5; O. Wilson (ed.), My Dearest Dora: Letters to Dora Livesey…from John Ruskin, 1984, pp.88-9; J. Christian, ‘Burne-Jones’s “Childe Roland”’, National Art Collections Fund Review, 1984, pp.122-4; C. Wood, Burne-Jones, 1998, p.41, illus.

Copyright © Trustees of Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

Extract taken from Watercolours and Drawings, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery by Evelyn Joll.