Pre-Raphaelite “Comfort”

What would it be like to live in a house with furniture designed by, say, William Morris or someone with similar ideals?  Lest anyone read John Ruskin or Morris or the various Pre-Raphaelites and think he’d like to live in such an abode, I offer this from Angela Thirkell, the granddaughter of Edward Burne-Jones:

Curtains and chintzes in The Bower were all of Morris stuffs, a bright pattern of yellow birds and red roses.  The low sofa and the oak table were designed by one or other pre-Raphaelite friend of the house, or made to my grandfather’s orders by the village carpenter.

As I look back on the furniture of my grandparents’ two houses I marvel chiefly at the entire lack of comfort which the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood succeeded in creating for itself.  It was not, I think, so much that they actively despised comfort, as that the word conveyed absolutely nothing to them whatever.

I can truthfully say that neither at North End Road nor at North End House was there a single chair that invited to repose, and the only piece of comfortable furniture that my grandparents ever possessed was their drawing-room sofa in London, a perfectly ordinary large sofa with good springs, only disguised by Morris chintzes.

The sofas at Rottingdean were simply long low tables with a little balustrade round two, or sometimes three sides, made of plain oak or some inferior wood painted white.  There was a slight concession to human frailty in the addition of rigidly hard squabs covered with chintz or blue linen and when to these my grandmother had added a small bolster apparently made of concrete and two or three thin unyielding cushions, she almost blamed herself for wallowing in undeserved luxury….

As for pre-Raphaelite beds, it can only have been the physical vigour and perfect health of their original designers that made them believe their work was fit to sleep in.  It is true that the spring mattress was then in an embryonic stage and there were no spiral springs to prevent a bed from taking the shape of a drinking-trough after a few weeks’ use, but even this does not excuse the use of wooden slats running lengthways as an aid to refreshing slumber.

Luckily children never know when they are uncomfortable and the pre-Raphaelites had in many essentials the childlike mind. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, pp. 64-65.

Heredity … of a Sort

Angela Thirkell was the granddaughter of the painter Edward Burne-Jones, who was influenced in his early years by Gabriel Rossetti but who later developed his own style and his own ideals of beauty, which he transmitted not only in his art but, surprisingly, also in his progeny.  She talks about the “pure ‘Burne-Jones’ type” of woman:

The curious thing is — and it ought to open a fresh field of inquiry into heredity — that the type which my grandfather evolved for himself was transmitted to some of his descendants.

In his earlier pictures there is a reflection of my grandmother in large-eyed women of normal, or almost low stature, as against the excessively long-limbed women of his later style.  But the hair of these early women is not hers, it is the hair of Rossetti’s women, the masses of thick wavy hair which we knew in “Aunt Janey,” the beautiful Mrs. William Morris.  When I remember her, Aunt Janey’s hair was nearly white, but there were still the same masses of it, waving from head to tip.

To any one who knew her, Rossetti’s pictures — with the exception of his later exaggerated types — were absolutely true.  The large deep-set eyes, the full lips, the curved throat, the overshadowing hair, were all there.  Even in her old age she looked like a queen as she moved about the house in long white draperies, her hands in a white muff, crowned by her glorious hair.

But when my grandfather began to develop in a different direction from his master Gabriel he saw in his mind a type of woman who was to him the ultimate expression of beauty.  Whenever he saw a woman who approached his vision he used her, whether model or friend.  Some of my grandparents’ lasting friendships were begun in chance encounters with a “Burne-Jones face” which my grandfather had to find a way of knowing.

As my mother grew up she was the offspring of her father’s vision and the imprint of this vision has lasted to a later generation.  I do not know of another case in which the artist’s ideal has taken such visible shape as in my mother.

If the inheritance were more common one would have to be far more careful in choosing one’s artist forbears.  El Greco, for instance, or Rowlandson, would be responsible for such disastrous progeny from the point of view of looks. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, pp. 23-24.

Moral: Be careful what and whom you admire.  If Thirkell is right, your children might just look like that.

Bells on Sunday

I suppose every one has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as cubes and triangles.  Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday.  This day has  feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to eternity and mornings full of far-off bells.

How varying are the evocations of bells.  They have almost as much power to startle a memory to life as the odours which annihilate the years between us and our childhood.  Wherever I am in the world, a grey warm Sunday with the sound of bells coming damped through quiet unceasing rain will mean Oxford to me.  In the underworld, twelve thousand miles away, that sound of bells in steady rain has translated me for a moment to Oxford in early summer and the scented drip from hawthorne and laburnum.

And even now to hear bells in London on a June morning makes me lose the many intervening years and go back to a pale gold Sunday when the sun shone on an endless leisured day. — Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, p. 15.