The Council Chamber
Burne-Jones, Edward, English artist, 1833-1898
1872-1892
oil on canvas
Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial, 1935

The most important artist in the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham, England, the son of a frame-maker.’ While at Oxford, he came under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. After moving to London in 1856, he became friendly with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who became the primary influence on his early career. In 1861, Burne-Jones became a partner in William Morris’ “Fine Art Workmen” firm (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.) and thenceforth had a long career as a painter and designer. By 1877, he was fully established and by the 1890s he had an international reputation. Burne-Jones passed out of popularity by World War I with the decline of the Victorian aesthetic and its themes.

The Council Chamber is part of a cycle of paintings, called “The Briar Rose” series, done by Burne-Jones several times and in different forms, illustrating the Sleeping Beauty legend. Although the title “Briar Rose” is a direct translation of the German version (“Dornroschen”), there is more evidence to suggest that the artist’s immediate inspiration was Tennyson’s poem Day Dreams (1842), particularly the lines:

Each baron at the banquet sleeps,
Grave faces gather’d in a ring,
His state the king reposing keeps,
He must have been a jovial king.

This theme first appeared in a set of tiles Burne-Jones designed in 1863; next in a set of three paintings done between 1870 and 1873 now in the Museo d’Arte in Pence, Puerto Rico; and then in a set of four larger paintings done between 1870 and 1890 now in the Faringdon Collection Trust at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire. The final set of three paintings, of which this Council Chamber is one, was begun in 1872 and finished in 1895. The other two of that set are in the City Art Gallery, Bristol (England) and the Municipal Art Gallery (Dublin).

At least one scholar has suggested that Burne-Jones’ paintings of the somnolent kingdom in the Briar Rose series offered viewers a Utopian counterpart to the nineteenth century, exemplified by one critic’s reaction:

"I shall never forget the deep impression made on me, not only by the Briar Rose series itself, but by the attitude of the public who crowded to see it…Now and then, there was the soft rustle of a dress, a noise as faint as the fall of a dry leaf in a wood…The whole scene transported me to a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone. "

And, it is possible that Burne-Jones - who held strong political convictions - meant to express his feelings of frustration with the prospects for reform in English politics and his hope for a secular “redeemer” (the Prince).

The painting’s slow rhythms and misty colors evoke a mood of death-like slumber. On a personal level, Burne-Jones was preoccupied with death during his late career fearing that his daughter was going to die and experiencing a premonition that he himself would die shortly. In the Sleeping Beauty legend, the old King will face the loss of his awakened daughter and his own eventual death.

Burne-Jones’ wife noted that he was often “amused…that people had to be told what they ought to think about his pictures as well as by their determination to find a deep meaning in every line he drew”. Still, his work elicited reactions from his contemporaries at least partially because many of his paintings do resonate with so many levels of meaning. Burne-Jones intensified viewers’ participation in the work by not showing the most telling narrative elements of his subjects, preferring to paint scenes just on the verge of dramatic action, or, as here, scenes whose essence is quietude and lack of action. "I want…to tell no more, to leave all the afterwards to the invention and imagination of people and tell them no more."

Mary F. Holahan

Sources consulted:

Burne-Jones: The paintings, graphic and decorative work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975. (exhib