Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Hope, 1896, 179 x 63.5 cm, oil on canvas (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and we’re looking at a lovely Burne-Jones that’s called “Hope.” It’s an allegory in the Renaissance tradition. So often in Renaissance paintings, you see images that are personifications of virtues. But it’s so interesting to see one at the very end of the 19th century.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:21] We know that Burne-Jones really admired Renaissance art, and had made a trip to Italy, and was enthusiastic about all of the great Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Giotto.
Dr. Zucker: [0:32] I really see Botticelli here. It makes sense to me that this is a pose that would have been inspired by what he saw in Italy.
Dr. Harris: [0:40] There’s an interesting story behind this commission. Burne-Jones was asked by the patron to paint a dancing figure.
[0:48] When William Morris died, who was a very close friend, Burne-Jones wrote to the patron and asked if instead of doing a dancing figure, he could instead go back to an earlier watercolor that he had done of a figure of Hope and redo it in oil. That’s what we’re looking at here.
Dr. Zucker: [1:05] In some ways, this is a really personal image. When you know that story, it fills the lyricism of this painting with a kind of emotional power. We have this beautiful, graceful figure. In some ways, she’s still dancing, but you’ll notice that she’s chained. She’s shackled.
[1:19] We know the situation is serious because that shackle around her ankle is placed just over some small flowers, which are periwinkle, which in antiquity was used to crown people who had been condemned to death.
Dr. Harris: [1:32] And so it’s hard to feel hopeful. I suppose that’s the point of hope, is that one struggles to feel it against all odds. The way that she’s chained to the earth and yet reaches up toward the sky but seems to successfully pull the sky down toward her, it’s a really lovely metaphor for exactly the way that hope feels.
Dr. Zucker: [1:54] Those words are a nice metaphor for the way in which the painting is actually structured. The painting is lyrical but it’s full of specificity, the kind of specificity that we associate with the Pre-Raphaelites in general. Look, for instance, at the apple blossoms that she holds in her arm, a traditional symbol of hope.
[2:11] There’s a real specificity in the rendering of those apples, and yet at the same time, the painting also allows for this completely dreamlike idea of pulling the sky down. And so you have the technical precision but also then this pure fantasy.
Dr. Harris: [2:27] In a way, she is both earthbound and also transcendent as a figure of hope.
Dr. Zucker: [2:32] The painting is wonderful also in that the artist takes advantage of the opportunity to metaphorically speak to the subject at hand, this notion of hope and the notion of bondage. One of the most beautiful examples of that is in her hair, which is both free and beautiful but also tied.
[2:49] Look at the way that it wraps around her neck. It becomes a noose, but it’s beautiful, and it’s loose, and it could unbundle itself.
Dr. Harris: [2:56] It’s interesting that Burne-Jones is, in a way, through this painting memorializing his relationship with his good friend William Morris. We can interpret hope, therefore, as hope for an afterlife, hope for meeting in heaven.
[3:11] It’s interesting, to me that Burne-Jones as a modern man in the modern industrial world, he’s not representing Christ resurrected from the tomb, but instead this allegorical figure that works in a modern world to speak of hope in all of its forms.
Dr. Zucker: [3:28] I find its format interesting. It’s very tall and thin, as if it might be a panel in a stained-glass window. There’s something almost Gothic about its proportions.
[3:37] I also find it interesting that the museum displays it without glass. It recalls a letter that Burne-Jones wrote about this painting and about the patrons of this painting saying that they were not displaying it behind glass because of the bad reflections that it caused, but Burne-Jones was disappointed.
[3:55] He loved his paintings to be behind glass and thought it gave it a kind of “ethereal glazing,” as he called it. It speaks to his visual sensitivity.
Dr. Harris: [4:03] The composition is interesting. The very shallow space that the figure stands in so that she seems entrapped in this very tiny niche, the bars of the window behind her that entrap her, the lyricism of her body, those lovely curves formed by her hand moving down to her wrist, out to her elbow, back to her shoulder, across to her other shoulder.
[4:25] This curving lovely figure, based on figures from Botticelli, that’s in such contrast to that grid behind her.
Dr. Zucker: [4:33] That’s exactly it. All that is organic in the human body against all that is hard and cold in the architecture of the space that we create.
Dr. Harris: [4:40] Maybe this is really a painting about contrasts. Hope both being earthbound but turning toward heaven. The hard grid formed by the bars against the sinuousness of her body. The specificity of the earthly against the classical idealism. This is a painting that unites opposites.
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One of the artist’s last works
One of the last large paintings created by Edward Burne-Jones before his death in 1898, Hope is an allegorical painting in the Renaissance tradition. The lone female figure is reminiscent of the graceful women of Botticelli, while the symbolic message of the painting is subtly, yet effectively conveyed. The slender figure is confined within a narrow space, a shackle around her ankle chaining her to the ground, while she reaches for the sky above and beyond the cage-like bars behind her. In her arms is a branch of apple blossoms, the symbol of hope.
Figure reaching (detail), Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Hope, 1896, 179 x 63.5 cm, oil on canvas (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Hope was commissioned by Mrs. George Maston Whitin of Whitinville, Massachusetts, also a patron of John Singer Sargent. Mrs. Whitin originally requested a figure of a dancing girl, but Burne-Jones, upset over the recent death of his friend and collaborator William Morris, asked if he could produce a figure of “hope” instead.
Friendship with William Morris
Burne-Jones and Morris had been friends since they met at Exeter College, Oxford in 1853. Together the two had come under the influence of Gabriel Dante Rossetti when they participated in the scheme to paint murals on the subject of King Arthur in the Oxford Union. In 1861 Morris co-founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., also know as “The Firm,” which created decorative elements inspired by a love of medieval imagery and a determination to move away from the mass production of industrial society. When the original company dissolved, Morris founded Morris and Co. in 1875, which carried on the work of creating textiles, carpets, wallpaper, furniture, stained glass and other decorative items. Many of the artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood contributed designs for stained glass windows, tapestries and other items, while Morris himself specialized in designs for wallpaper and fabrics.
A member of the Socialist movement from the early 1880s, Morris believed in the power of art to transform society, and the importance of creating beauty in the home as a way of uplifting the spirit. His often quoted advice to “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” is typical of his attitude that people should surround themselves with beautiful things as a buffer against the squalor of industrial society. Morris was also convinced of the superiority of handmade objects over things that were mass-produced. Unfortunately, his egalitarian principles were thwarted as the meticulous processes used to create his goods also made his products too expensive for most people.
Stained glass
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Hope, 1896, 179 x 63.5 cm, oil on canvas (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Burne-Jones frequently designed stained glass for Morris, and Hope bears a strong resemblance to many of his designs. The vertical organization of the composition, fairly typical in the work of the artist, resembles an elongated church window. The bars behind her head form a grid similar to the iron bars that support the glass in a stained glass window. In fact, the painting bares a strong resemblance to the figure of Hope in an earlier stained glass window of Faith, Hope and Charity that Burne-Jones designed for Christ Church Oxford in 1871.
A beautiful romantic dream
Burne-Jones once wrote “I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms divinely beautiful.” In his painting Hope the artist puts on canvas what he earlier put into words, and at the end of a long career still shows his lasting dedication to the creation of beauty.
