Comparison 5: Edward Burne-Jones Gets Personal
Edward Burne-Jones
LEFT: Cupid and Psyche (c. 1870)
Watercolor, gouache, and pastel on paper mounted on linen, W48.3 cm x H70.2 cm (19.01" x 27.63")
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT USA
RIGHT: Study of a Head or Study for Cupid Finding Psyche (1870)
Pencil, approx. W16 cm x H19.3 cm (6.29" x 7.59")
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Today's post is mostly thanks to a piece by Allison Holland at the National Gallery of Victoria, which you can check out here: Edward Burne-Jones, Psyche, and the Earthly Paradise
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Yet another crack at the Cupid and Psyche story (which I did warn you was popular with artists). But we have now jumped forward ~160 years and over a few countries, getting to the British Edward Burne-Jones.
We've seen how Crespi's painting was taken in a somewhat unusual domestic direction, with an emphasis on the intimacy (of a sort) between the two figures. Burne-Jones (showing us Cupid's first sight of Psyche asleep) also focuses just on the figures, with at least some intimacy in a setting that suggests a partially-enclosed garden, but the big new factor in this take is a different kind of intimacy — his use of his lover Maria Zambaco1 as the model for Psyche.
While artists for ages and ages have used people they've known personally to model for them and/or life experiences to guide their work, these personal touches were often meant to fly under the radar initially, little nods for people already in the know. (Perhaps Crespi's also drew on some form of personal experience.) Burne-Jones isn't doing anything terribly different from that here...except that he also used Zambaco as a model over and over, often in the mode of a lover/seductress, and often in paintings with themes of love, temptation, guilt, and remorse. (It's okay though, I bet none of their mutual acquaintances read into that too much.)
Burne-Jones and like-minded artists would ultimately build on the idea of using well-known stories like Cupid and Psyche as frameworks for adding personal meaning — leading us through the 20th century and up to today, where we often assume that a work has a personal backstory.
NOTES:
1. Maria Cassavetti Zambaco was an artist in her own right as a sculptor, but was also well-known as a model, moving in the highest literary/artistic circles of the time and posing for a few other artists she met. Burne-Jones (who was incidentally married, with a daughter) became obsessed with her after she posed for a painting commission, and they had an affair that lasted for over 2 years, which they finally broke it off (after her suicide attempts by laudanum/jumping off a bridge and his mounting guilt over his wife and the daughter he adored), but after which they still kept loosely in touch. Meanwhile, Burne-Jones' wife was likely in reciprocated love with a poet/writer friend of the family, and that guy's wife was also in love with another artist, whom Maria also sat for. They all managed to stick to their original spouses, but the whole thing is a Victorian soap opera chock-full of shenanigans. (I would suggest the title of the TV show to be Burne It Down, but I see BBC's already done a version called Desperate Romantics.)