Portrait of a Girl in a green dress by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt ARA

Portrait of a Girl in a green dress

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt ARA (1833-1898)

early 1890s

Oil on canvas

32 x 19 3/4

Provenance: The artist's son, Sir Philip Burne-Jones, Bart.; Sir Philip Burne-jones's sale, Christie's, 5 June 1919, lot 170; Mrs. Hilda and Matti Holt.

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Commentary by Christopher Newall

John Gordon Christian has kindly dated the present portrait to the early 1890s. Unfortunately it has not proved possible to identify the sitter. Burne-Jones had a weakness for solemn, dark-eyed girls. He encouraged many young girls, some of them friends of his daughter Margaret, to sit for him for portraits or to serve as models in his figure paintings; many of these girls became his friends.

As a painting the present portrait is strikingly modern, akin to work done in the first decade of the twentieth century rather than the end of the nineteenth. The reduced range of melancholy colours, the wistful, distant expression of the girl's face, and the broad, confident brush-strokes of her hands suggest the paintings of Picasso during the Blue Period. This is not such an impossible connection as it might at first seem. Burne-Jones was greatly admired in Europe in the last years of his life. In Barcelona, where Picasso lived as a young man, a circle of painters and journalists made a cult of English painting and illustration from the Pre-Raphaelites onwards. Beardsley was regarded as a hero of modernism and was imitated by Spanish artists. The periodical Joventut reproduced drawings by Rossetti, Arthur Boyd Houghton and Burne-Jones. In 1898 the Society of San Luc in Barcelona held a session in honour of Burne-Jones. It may well be that the youthful Picasso, who certainly knew and admired Burne-Jorics's drawings and paintings, subconsciously incorporated something of the spirit of the English painter into his own work.

Note: 'For further information on the currents of artistic influence in turn-of-the-century Barcelona see Blunt, Anthony and Pool, Phoebe, Picasso The Formative Years, 1962, pp 8, 20, ills. 16, 23, 27, 28.

References

Burne-Jones, Georgina, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. London: 1904.

Newall, Christopher. A Celebration of British and European Painting of the 19th and 20th Centuries. London: Peter Nahum, nd [1999?]. Pp. 44-45.

Last modified 8 December 2004