Sketchbook, 1870s–1880s

Tan cloth covers, pencil sleeve, remains of cloth ties; forty-four
pages of heavy cream wove paper (the remaining pages are uncut)
13.4 x 94 cm
Bequest of Grenville L. Winthrop
1943.1815.15

A devoted follower of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and close friend and associate of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones became the foremost artist of the second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His romantic, graceful compositions were inspired by Michelangelo and Botticelli. In concert with Morris, he also produced designs for stained glass, tapestries, and book illustrations.

Burne-Jones insisted on the importance of drawing every day, and filled dozens of sketchbooks with studies of all kinds. While some of his sketchbooks include rapid composition studies, others, like this one, reveal an artist of some caution and deliberation—painstaking in his preparation for finished works. Philip Burne-Jones remembered that "before starting upon the actual painting of a large composition it was my father's custom to make innumerable careful studies of limbs, drapery, etc. in chalk or pencil—and from these he worked upon the picture."(1)A[nn] W. R[ogers], "An Introduction to Three Sketchbooks from the Institute's Collection," The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 59 (1970): 67 (note 3). Because Burne-Jones labored over many of his paintings for decades, it is difficult to date his sketchbooks based on relationships to particular works. Some of the drawings may even be records of satisfactory elements in finished paintings rather than studies for them.

This sketchbook—one of four by Burne-Jones in the Fogg Art Museum’s collection—contains a large number of drapery studies, in which the fabric is intricately tied in often-improbable knots. In some of the drawings, the drapery takes on a life of its own, floating freely with little or no reference to the physical body; in others, it is bound around the waist or loins, sometimes serving as an elaborate sling for a sword. The drawings include studies of a cloaked male figure holding a staff and a series of heads of a curly-haired youth, along with several studies of turbaned female heads and draped female figures that may relate to the artist’s The Wheel of Fortune (1875–83; Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

1. A[nn] W. R[ogers], "An Introduction to Three Sketchbooks from the Institute's Collection," The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 59 (1970): 67 (note 3).