Authors: Elizabeth Hickey
She did not ask why she could not wear the dull dress and have him paint it blue. He wanted her to have an iridescent blue dress and so she would have one. Instead of sitting for her portrait, she and Rossetti left Tudor House and went to Oxford Street. There, in the third shop they visited, they found what they were looking for, a crisp blue silk with the sheen of a gem. Jane bought twelve yards of it.
She worked on the dress in every spare moment.
“It’s very pretty, Mama,” said Jenny one day, touching a corner of the material hesitantly.
“Do you like it, May?” asked Jane.
May nodded. “It’s rustley,” she said.
“Mr. Rossetti says I should wear it a few times at home before I come to sit for him, to take away the stiffness of it,” said Jane.
The girls were excited to see it on her.
“Will you wear it to our tea party?” asked Jenny. “I think Flora would like to see it.” Flora was Jenny’s china doll.
“Of course, darling,” said Jane. “When it’s finished, we’ll have a tea party.”
Morris was disappointed that in the portrait she would not be wearing the dress he chose.
“It’s my picture,” he complained. “I paid for it, you should wear the dress I want.”
“This is the palette he’s working in right now,” explained Jane. “Bright, oriental. There’s a red curtain behind me and the contrast would not be so arresting without this shade of blue.”
“Artists,” muttered Morris. “So cantankerous and particular and obsessed.”
“I don’t know anyone else like that,” said Jane.
“Yes, I suppose I am,” admitted Morris ruefully. “If I could paint you, I would put you in the other dress. As I can’t, I suppose I will just have to give in gracelessly.”
“You do it very well,” Jane said, smiling.
When it was finished the dress had a full, voluminous skirt and dropped shoulders in the dolman style Jane favored. It was ornamented with delicate gold thread at the throat and wrists.
“Mama’s a princess,” breathed May when Jane appeared in the nursery for the tea party, and Jenny and Flora agreed.
M
ORRIS
published the first volume of
The Earthly Paradise
in 1868. It was an immediate success. Even Rossetti had to admit that it was very good.
“I don’t like sagas much,” he said sulkily, brandishing a brush slick and wet with lapis. “I’m more for single poems, perhaps about a beautiful woman. But it’s the best of its kind.”
Jane thought sadly about the time in Oxford when Morris had brought her his poem, apprehensive and shy. And of the poems he’d written about her when they were first married, announcing his love and declaiming her beauty. He no longer read his poems to her. It was her own fault. She had taken her love from him; she could not expect him to share his poetry with her.
Rossetti was hard at work painting the folds of her dress. The underpainting was almost black, the next layer the color of the deep sea. Where the light reflected off the seam attaching the arm to the bodice and the sleeves he wove threads of hot, Caribbean blue.
“It’s rather melancholy,” said Jane.
“I’d be melancholy, too, if I were Topsy. Of course he does nothing about it, just composes mournful lines.”
“But as you said, his poems are good.”
“I can write good poems, too,” Rossetti snapped. “I just happen to think that painting is more important.”
Jane knew he was annoyed because Morris’s book was receiving so much attention and selling so well. “So do I,” she said soothingly.
“I’m very nearly finished with this,” he said, stepping back from his canvas and squinting at it critically. “I could do more, but it would just be overpainting and it would get mucked up and ruined.”
“I hate to give up these afternoons,” said Jane. “They are the happiest moments of my days.”
“Who said these afternoons should end when the portrait is finished?” Rossetti asked, wiping his hands carefully on a clean rag. “We must start in immediately on another. I was thinking Mariana, from
Measure for Measure.”
He came to where she was sitting and picked her up, chair and all.
“Gabriel,” she shrieked. “What are you doing?”
“I am conveying you to the boudoir, my sweet,” he said. “You see, I can use fine, poetical language if I want to.”
Rossetti thought of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese while he was painting Jane’s portrait, and in the finished product Jane’s hair shone very brightly against the red curtain behind her, and her dress glowed like sunlight on water. At the bottom of the canvas he wrote: “Famous for her poet husband, and famous for her face, may my picture add to her fame.”
“What a talented painter Rossetti is,” said Morris when he saw it. He spoke apparently without jealousy. “He was right about the color of your dress. I like the vase of white roses against that dark background. But I don’t like the pink carnations. The color is insipid. Why did he put carnations in anyway? Such an ugly flower.”
“I like them,” said Jane.
Rossetti had written a declaration of love into the painting, using the language of flowers. He knew that Morris thought it silly and would not know what any of the flowers meant. Jane, however, knew that the pink carnation in her belt, and on the book open in front of her, symbolized her love. The large vase of white roses meant “I am worthy of you.” Rossetti was telling her he was a different man from the one who had driven his wife to suicide. There were no other women now, no Fanny or Alexa. Only Jane.
Morris hung the finished portrait in the parlor above his customary reading chair. Jane thought it odd that he did not place it where he could look at it. Instead Jane faced herself while she sewed, which she found unsettling. Still, she liked to look up at it every now and then, and a little thrill went through her each time she thought to herself, He loves me.
In January 1869, Burne-Jones got into an argument with Maria Zambaco outside Robert Browning’s house. When he said that he would not leave his wife, she tried to drown herself in Paddington Canal. The police were called and Burne-Jones was nearly arrested. Morris agreed to go with him to Rome to escape from the scandal and from the hysterical Maria.
“I’ll be gone at least a month,” he said to Jane as she packed his suitcase. “I am so sorry to leave like this, but you know I can’t abandon Ned. The man is wretched.”
“What of Georgie?” asked Jane hotly. “I’m sure she is completely serene about it all.”
“Don’t talk to me of Georgie,” snapped Morris. “She is the dearest friend I have in the world, after Ned. I am only trying to help both of them.”
Jane said nothing, but continued to fold his shirts. She would be relieved when he was gone. Think of all the extra hours she could spend with Rossetti.
“I do have one favor to ask of you,” said Morris. “I would prefer that you not sit for Gabriel while I’m gone.”
Jane, startled, glanced up at her husband, but he was looking out the window at the passing carriages.
“If that is what you wish,” said Jane angrily, unable to think of an argument against it.
“It is,” said Morris.
Georgie appeared the next morning in traveling costume, her eyes very red.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “The children are in the carriage.”
“You’re not going after him?” said Jane, alarmed.
“Oh, no,” said Georgie. “We’re going to Oxford. I’ve rented some rooms there. I can’t stay here, not with…not with all that’s happened. I’ll lose my mind, I really will. Some time in the country will be good for me. Shall I visit your mother while I’m there?”
“Not unless you really want to suffer,” said Jane.
Georgie smiled the smallest possible smile. “I expect to be gone at least a month, perhaps longer,” she said.
Jane embraced her friend. “I will write to you,” she said.
Morris and Burne-Jones went as far as Dover before Burne-Jones demanded that they return to London. He did not retrieve his wife and children immediately, but within a month the family was reunited.
Morris began illustrating a large book of his verses for Georgie, painstakingly imitating the techniques of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Jane was nearly sick with relief that she did not have to forgo her time with Rossetti. He was making sketches for the painting of Shakespeare’s Mariana, and he would have been annoyed at the interruption and infuriated by its cause.
But whether it was because of Rossetti’s love or in spite of it, Jane’s backaches became excruciating. She found that no matter how much she wanted to go to Tudor House, there were many days when she could not rise from bed. Morris was very concerned and made arrangements for the whole family to go to a spa in Germany for the summer. Jane was heartbroken at the idea of being away from London and Rossetti, but the pain was too great for her to pretend any longer that she was all right.
London, August 1, 1869
My Dear Mr. Morris,
I hope that by the time you receive this you are settled in nicely and that Jane is resting comfortably. I’m sure the train journey was very trying but it is all in the interest of making her well and strong again and one could bear anything if one could make that happen!
Ned misses you horribly, of course. On Sunday he wandered the house aimlessly, from dining room to hall and back again, from sitting room to studio to kitchen, as if he were a dog that had lost its master. Twice he put on his coat and hat as if to go and meet you, and twice I had to gently remind him that you were away until at least the end of September. At last he went into his studio and began to paint but he said his work that day was a complete failure. I don’t know what he shall do without you!
Philip fell out of the oak tree and for a while we feared he had broken his elbow but it turned out to be only badly bruised. At times like this I think you are fortunate to have girls!
Ever your,
Georgie
Fortuna Bad-Ems,
August 1, 1869
My Dear Gabriel,
Today I have drunk four glassfuls of cloudy, tepid water and had a steaming hot bath that smelled of sulphur, followed by a freezing-cold bath that smelled of mud. This evening I will repeat the entire process again. I cannot say that my back throbs any less or that my head has ceased to ache, but it is certainly different. There is a little lake here with strange-looking ducks with red tufted heads. Yesterday William poled me about in a gondola, with more energy than skill, I must say, and we had a little picnic of pork sandwiches and cold potatoes. I gave most of my sandwich to the birds, and they seemed to enjoy it much more than I.
Your Jane
Fortuna Bad-Ems,
August 4, 1869
My Dear Gabriel,
I feel very hopeful that I will return from this journey much better than when I left. Whether or not you will be able to stand me in my altered state remains to be seen. We went for a drive in the countryside today and I was jounced around quite a bit. It was extremely wet but the country is very green and wild—like Millais’s painting of Ruskin, with the giant granite rocks and the cold rushing stream. William occupies himself tramping about for several hours a day, and working on his poems—right now it’s Accontius and Cydippe. He seems dissatisfied with what he has, but then he often is. He is reading me
Vanity Fair
and it’s quite a sacrifice, I assure you, as he loathes it absolutely. In your last letter you wrote that you had a cold. A summer cold is dreadful. I hope by the time you receive this you are much better.
Your Jane
Fortuna Bad-Ems,
August 9, 1869
My Dear Mrs. Burne-Jones,
How funny it looks to write your name that way! To me your husband will always be Ned Jones, no matter what gewgaws he affixes to his name!
I was sorry to hear of Ned’s condition. I advise brisk walks and plenty of shortbread. Tell Philip to keep his feet on the ground. We cannot afford to lose any of you.
Janey appears to be better. I don’t know if it is the water she drinks or the water in which she bathes, the clean air or the chilly sleeping quarters, but the circles under her eyes are not so purple and she may have gained a pound or two. I find the spa somewhat stifling, but I just go on my way with my notebook and pen my silly verses and am as happy as can be.
William
Fortuna Bad-Ems,
August 12, 1869
My Dear Mrs. Burne-Jones,
Forgive my audacity in writing to you this way, but my heart is too full to remain silent and you have been so kind in the past in listening to my ranting and raving. My last, cheerful letter was a lie. I thought perhaps that leaving London and coming somewhere restful we might have a chance to quietly reform our battered and bent marriage. And she is kind—so very kind! She kills with kindness, because it is so formal, and distant, like an angel on high. But she is so far away from me I begin to despair that she will ever return. What am I to do? At night I dream of death, sometimes hers, sometimes my own. During the day I try to remain cheerful, for the kiddies if for no other reason, but at night I cannot stop the gruesome nightmares. Tell me what to do. Tell me how I am to bear it!
William