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St George and the Dragon: The Princess tied to the Tree Longer the shades grew, quicker sank the sun, Until at last the day was well-nigh done. signed with initials and dated 'E B J/18/66' (lower left) oil on canvas 41 7/8 x 361/2 in. (106.4 x 92.7 cm.) PROVENANCE Commissioned by Myles Birket Foster for 'The Hill', Witley. His sale; Christie's, London, 28 April 1894, lot 48 (5) (2000 gns to Agnew). Major C. F. Goldman by 1898. William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme; (+) Anderson Galleries, New York, 17 February 1926, part 2, lot 13. The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ. Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 5 March 1971, lot 16 (552 gns to Fine Art Society). with Sayn-Wittgenstein Fine Art, New York, from whom acquired by the present owner in 1985. LITERATURE Burne-Jones's autograph work-record (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), under 1866. M. Bell, Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review, 4th ed., London, 1898, pp. 35-7, 130. O. von Schleinitz, Burne-Jones (Kunstler-Monographien LV), Beilefeld and Leipzig, 1901, p. 58. F. De Lisle, Burne-Jones, London, 1904, pp. 75-6, 167, 181. G(eorgiana) B(urne)-J(ones), Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, vol. 1, pp. 295-6, 304. M. Harrison and B. Waters, Burne-Jones, London, 1973, pp. 89-90, 193. P. Fitzgerald, Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography, London, 1975, p. 96. R. Dorment, James McNeill Whistler, exh. Tate Gallery, London, Mus‚e d'Orsay, Paris, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1994-5, cat. p. 93. S. Wildman and J. Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, exh. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, and Mus‚e d'Orsay, Paris, 1998-9, cat. p. 115. D. Elliott, Charles Fairfax Murray: The Unknown Pre-Raphaelite, Lewes, 2000, p. 19. EXHIBITION London, Thomas McLean's Gallery, 7 Haymarket, 1895, no. 5. London, Gooden's Gallery, Pall Mall, 1896. Munich, Koeniglicher Glaspalast, VII Internationale Kunstausslellung, 1897, no. 226. London, New Gallery, Works of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1898-9, no. 97. Indianapolis, Herron Museum of Art, and New York, Gallery of Modern Art, The Pre-Raphaelites, 1964, no. 12. Palm Beach, Florida, The Society of the Four Arts, English Paintings of the Victorian Era, 1966, no. 7. New York, Wildenstein & Co., and Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, From Realism to Symbolism: Whistler and his World, 1971, no. 56. Peoria, Illinois, Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences, The Victorian Rebellion, 1971, no. 10. The Heatherley School of Fine Art: 150th Anniversary, 1996, no. 25. Takamatsu, City Museum; Tokyo, Bunkamura Museum of Art; and Himeji, City Museum, Symbolisme en Europe, 1996-7, no. 43. La Era Victoriana, 1997, no. 16. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Birmingham, Museums and Art Gallery; and Paris, Mus‚e d'Orsay, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, 1998-9, no. 34 (photograph reversed in catalogue). NOTES According to medieval legend, St George was a Roman tribune, born in Cappadocia, who came to the town of Silene in Libya. The town was menaced by a dragon, which was devouring the children of its citizens. One day it fell to the king's daughter, the princess Sabra, to be sacrificed, but as she awaited her doom St George appeared and dispatched the dragon or, as sometimes depicted, took it captive and led it into the town. Thereupon the king and his subjects, overjoyed at their escape, were baptised. The picture is the fifth in a series of seven canvases illustrating this legend which were commissioned by the watercolourist Myles Birket Foster (fig. 1) for his house, 'The Hill', at Witley in Surrey. Designed by Foster himself in the Tudor style and completed in 1863, 'The Hill' was the centre of an artists' colony and full of works of art by its owner's friends and contemporaries. Particularly notable were the furnishings by the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., founded in 1861, of which Burne-Jones was a partner. Although Burne-Jones's art was so different from Foster's, Foster had a great admiration for his work. He seems to have promoted his election to the Old Water-Colour Society in 1864, and he was certainly one of his chief supporters in that ultra-conservative institution, where his pictures were often received with hostility. Burne-Jones designed most of the Morris stained glass and tiles which adorned 'The Hill' so profusely. Foster also acquired the screen which Burne-Jones had created out of his cartoons for the St Frideswide window in the Latin Chapel in the Cathedral at Christ Church, Oxford, executed in 1859. However, Burne-Jones's main contribution to 'The Hill' was the St George series which (rather inappropriately) Foster placed in the dining room. The first three canvases were installed by the end of 1865. The remaining four, including the present picture, hung fire, and were completed with the assistance of Charles Fairfax Murray, who, at the tender age of seventeen, became Burne-Jones's first studio assistant in November 1866. 'With help,' Lady Burne-Jones wrote in her Memorials of her husband, 'the last four pictures of "St George and the Dragon" were finished: the other three were already in place. This was the first time that Edward called in aid to carry out his designs, and in his assistant he was fortunate beyond expectation. Mr Charles Fairfax Murray was then a mere youth, but one whose intellectual and artistic power was visible at first sight. He soon became a trusted friend, in whose work Edward took great interest.' The paintings remained at 'The Hill' until Foster left the house in 1894, five years before his death. At his sale at Christie's on 28 April 1894 they were bought by Agnew's. Burne-Jones's dealers, for 2,000 guineas, and in February 1895 they were exhibited at Thomas McLean's Gallery in the Haymarket. They were then extensively repainted by Burne-Jones, who was obsessed with re-touching his early works during the last years of his life. In The Princess tied to the Tree the figure's head has been re-worked, and the wreath in her hair was added at this period. The pictures were also re-framed, the simple black or dark brown frames which are seen in old photographs of 'The Hill' being replaced by rather pretentious gilt ones in the Renaissance style. These are still on some of the series, but not The Princess tied to the Tree. In January 1896 the pictures were exhibited again, this time at Gooden's Gallery in Pall Mall. At both these exhibitions they were accompanied in the catalogue by appropriate verses by William Morris. In August 1897 the paintings were exhibited for a third time, at the Munich International Exhbiition, where they were awarded a gold medal. In 1898-9 they made their final appearance as a set when they were included in the Burne-Jones memorial exhibition mounted at the New Gallery in Regent Street, which he had supported since it had opened in 1888. Today the paintings are widely scattered. The first subject, The King's Daughter, in which the princess Sabra is seen walking in a garden, absorbed in an illuminated book and blissfully unaware of the ordeal that lies ahead, is in the Mus‚e d'Orsay, Paris. This is followed by two frieze-like compositions, The Petition to the King, in which anxious burghers show their sovereign grisly evidence of the dragon's ravages, and a scene showing the princess drawing the lot which condemns her to be the next victim. These paintings were long thought to be lost, but they turned up at Hanover College, Indiana, in 1997, when they were published by John Franklin Martin in the Burlington Magazine (vol. 139, pp. 330-4). In the next picture we see the princess being led to her doom; this was sold at Christie's on 25 October 1991 (lot 25), and is now in an English private collection (fig. 2). Then comes the present canvas, in which the victim is left to her fate in a flowery meadow while her maidens walk away in the distance. The penultimate subject is the fight between St George and the dragon (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), while in the last picture (Bristol City Art Gallery) the princess and her rescuer return to the city in triumph. Numerous studies for the paintings exist in the Birmingham Art Gallery. They include three for the present painting (65'04, 66'04 and 505'27), in one of which the princess is shown with her hands tied behind her back. There is also a set of highly finished composition drawings in pencil, lacking only the fourth subject, in the British Museum (fig. 3); and the William Morris Gallery at Walthamstow has a watercolour version of St George slaying the Dragon, dated 1868. Several of the paintings and related drawings are illustrated in the catalogue of the Burne-Jones centenary exhibition held in 1998, pp. 101-6. As Stephen Wildman has observed, the story of St George would have been familiar to Burne-Jones from two of his favourite books, The Golden Legend, a manual of ecclesiastical lore by the thirteenth-century writer Jacobus de Voragine, and Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). His interest in the subject must also have been stimulated by Carpaccio's famous paintings in the Scuola di S. Georgio degli Schiavoni, from which he had made copies during his visit to Venice in 1859. Nor was he the only member of his circle to illustrate the legend. D.G. Rossetti had done so in watercolours of 1857 - the well-known Wedding of St George (fig. 4) - and 1862 (both Tate Gallery), as well as in a set of stained glass cartoons made c. 1862 for the Morris firm (William Morris Gallery, Birmingham; glass panels in Victoria and Albert Museum). Morris himself painted scenes from the story on one of the firm's early cabinets (Victoria and Albert Museum), and made it the subject of a poem written for but not included in the Earthly Paradise, the great narrative cycle he was working on in the late 1860s and published 1868-70. This poem must have been in progress at about the time that Burne-Jones was painting Birket Foster's pictures, and it provided the quotations which appeared in the catalogues when the pictures were exhibited at McClean's and Gooden's Galleries in the 1890s. Burne-Jones produced other works based on the story of St George, but the requirements of stained glass ensured that they were all single standing figures. He designed three separate stained glass cartoons of this kind, for the church at Henley-in-Arden (1864), the Hall at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1871), and Philip Webb's new church at Brampton, Cumberland (1880). The figure designed for Peterhouse, part of a large and complex commission, was re-worked in three separate easel paintings. The first (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.) was one of the eight pictures which caused such a sensation when he exhibited them at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, bringing him fame overnight, while the other two, similar in composition but very different in style, date from the 1890s. The Wadsworth Atheneum picture and the better of the two later versions - marking a transition, as Stephen Wildman observes, from 'romantic hero' to 'Christian icon' - were shown together in the Burne-Jones centenary exhibition and are reproduced in the catalogue (pp. 214-5). Birket Foster's St George paintings represent an important moment in Burne-Jones's development as a painter. Having adopted an essentially narrative approach in his early work under the influence of D.G. Rossetti, he began from the mid-1860s to cultivate a more symbolist type of imagery. Even when a narrative element remained, the subject tended to be drained of drama, assuming an almost tangible stillness. All this owed much to the promptings of another mentor, John Ruskin, and can be related to important changes taking place in his art-historical and social ideas. The St George series were some of the last works in which Burne-Jones was concerned with dramatic narrative. Lady Burne-Jones's account of seeing them at Christie's in 1894 is significant. 'I was surprised by their dramatic character', she wrote in her Memorials, 'especially in the scenes where the king looks at the blood-stained clothes of the girls who have been devoured by the dragon, and where the poor mothers crowd into the temple while the princess draws the lot. I spoke of this to Edward afterwards, asking him whether he had not purposely suppressed the dramatic element in his later work, and he said yes, that was so - for no one can get every quality into a picture, and there were others that he designed more than the dramatic.' It is no accident that the paintings have often been discussed in relation to Whistler and the early Aesthetic Movement (see exhibition history and literature above). Richard Dorment, for instance, has argued that Whister's so-called 'Six Projects' (Freer Gallery, Washington), a set of sketches for decorative paintings commissioned by the Liverpool shipowner Frederick Leyland in 1867, 'depend on Burne-Jones's frieze of seven canvases illustrating the story of St George'. As Dorment reminds us, 'Whistler was in frequent contact with Burne-Jones in the early 1860s through their common acquaintance with Rossetti and members of his circle.' The 'Six Projects' were even painted in a studio in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, that had been occupied a few years earlier by Burne-Jones. But it was a case of shared values rather than hard-and-fast influence one way or another. These were the early days of Victorian classicism. Both artists were seeking inspiration in antique sculpture (that studio, significantly enough, was almost exactly opposite the entrance to the British Museum), and both betrayed this influence by painting frieze-like compositions full of heavily draped figures. True, Burne-Jones combines classical forms with gothic detail while Whistler introduces an element of japonisme, but the underlying intention is the same. Moreover, if Whistler learnt much from Burne-Jones, Burne-Jones surely owed something to Whistler in the way his compositions are dominated by the white draperies of the princess and her attendants. Whistler had long since pioneered the idea of basing a picture on a prevailing note of white. It is already established in At the Piano (Taft Museum, Cincinnati) of 1858-9, although it only reaches its full development in Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (National Gallery of Art, Washington) of 1862 and Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl (Tate Gallery) of 1864. While all these pre-date the St George series, Whistler's final variant, Symphony in White, No. 3 (fig. 3), in which two white-clad girls form a composition echoing parts of the Elgin frieze, is exactly contemporary, dating from 1865-7. The Princess tied to the Tree is something of an anomaly in that while 'white girls' are the salient features, the composition is not frieze-like or set in a shallow, clearly-defined picture space. On the contrary, a feeling of distance is deliberately evoked by the small figures of the attendant maidens walking away into the woods. In this respect the picture is unique among the St George paintings and unusual in Burne-Jones's work in general. Almost from the outset, he had a very strong sense of the need to keep his figures within a simple plane-system, and if anything this increased with time. Lady Burne-Jones, writing of Arthur in Avalon (Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico), that enormous late masterpiece on which he was still working at his death, noted that 'when the laws of perspective obliged him to make one of the watching maidens a good deal smaller than the others, he was uneasy until he had taken her out again. 'The little figure watching on the wall won't do,' he said, 'it would be suddenly diminished in size from the others and would turn into a landscape figure at once.' He bitterly regretted that it was no longer feasible 'to put a figure in the background of the same size as those in the front. The Greeks did it, and the old Italians, and it used to be quite right, but we can't any longer. We have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and can't have our garden of Eden any more - cannot paint with the same innocency that was once possible.'.