Edward Burne-Jones, Edgar Boehm and The Battle of Flodden Field

Apollo, August, 2003 by Mark Stocker

'If ever my eyes grow dim ... I will give up painting and take to sculpture.' (1) Although Sir Edward Burne-Jones's eyesight remained sharp enough to spare him from having to honour this resolution made to Elizabeth, Lady Lewis, his involvement with--and influence upon--late nineteenth-century sculpture has received considerable if long overdue attention in recent years. (2) However, there remains much to be said about his most important collaboration with a sculptor. This was the painted gesso relief of The Battle of Flodden Field of 1880-86 (Fig. 1), which was executed for Naworth Castle in Cumbria by Burne-Jones and Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, and is the focus of this article.

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Both regarded as leading figures in their respective mediums, Burne-Jones and Boehm were almost exact contemporaries and relatively close neighbours; both exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, and both were honoured by baronetcies. Their friendship was touchingly recalled when, after Boehm's death, Burne-Jones stated: 'Boehm I did heartily like ... and could have loved if we had been thrown together ... I loved to meet him in the world, which was about six times in our life. I never did a niceish picture without a letter from him, warm-hearted and unstinted in praise.' (3) In her biography of her husband, Georgiana Burne-Jones tellingly excised the following description of Boehm: 'he was manly and noble and it sickened him to let the life go by and be so little of what he could have been as an artist, for no one knew more than he what splendid work was or felt more humbled at all he had made of 2.' (4) Burne-Jones was almost certainly alluding to Boehm's constricting role as Queen Victoria's Sculptor-in-Ordinary. The welter of royal and official portraiture and memorial commissions that Boehm felt obliged to undertake in this capacity 'embittered his life', according to the critic M.H. Spielmann, and prevented him 'from attacking a work that demanded the highest power.' (5) The temperamental gulf between the 'establishment' figure of Boehm and the 'aesthetic' Burne-Jones was revealed when the former enthusiastically supported the latter's candidature for Associate Membership of the Royal Academy in 1885. Burne-Jones succumbed to persuasion, but soon regretted it, exhibited there only once, and resigned in 1893. (6)

Boehm and Burne-Jones collaborated on two occasions, and in both instances their patron was the same man: their friend and fellow artist, George Howard, the 9th Earl of Carlisle (1843-1911). (7) The first commission was a monument dating from 1879-81 to Howard's parents, the Hon. Charles Howard and Mary Parke, located in Lanercost Priory, Cumbria, close to the family seat of Naworth Castle (Fig. 5). Howard's father had recently died, whereas his mother had died in childbirth many years earlier. Philip Webb was responsible for the overall design of the monument and its frame; Burne-Jones for the designs of the two lower relief panels depicting the Nativity and the Entombment; and Boehm for modeling and casting them in bronze and also for designing, modelling and casting the portrait medallions of Charles and Mary Howard at the top. This relatively straightforward commission went well, with Burne-Jones producing his gouache and watercolour studies with uncharacteristic speed in the final months of 1879. (8) In connection with Boehm's contribution, Webb remarked to Howard that he had 'caught your father's expression very well indeed.' (9) By late 1880, the bronze medallions and panels were cast and ready for chasing, which Boehm hoped Howard would not mind him doing 'at leisure & con amore.' (10) Installed the following year, the monument bears witness to Boehm's 'amore'. The up-to-date realism of his portraiture, the whirling draperies of Burne-Jones's renaissance-inspired scenes and Webb's tactful design, framing the monument in Purbeck marble, combine to form an ensemble which no less an authority than Nikolaus Pevsner described as 'excellent'. George Howard's satisfaction with his parents' monument led him to commission another collaborative effort from Boehm and Burne-Jones, The Battle of Flodden Field (Fig. 1), but this proved to be far a more problematic undertaking.

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Flodden Field commemorates the military leadership of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and later 2nd Duke of Norfolk, an ancestor of George Howard. In September 1513, Howard's army annihilated the Scots at what historians today term simply the Battle of Flodden, fought on the English side of the border between the two kingdoms. The Scottish king, James IV, was killed together with almost half of the Scottish peerage and some ten thousand men. The battle inspired a rich body of literature, and most memorably Walter Scott's Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808). Traditionally, James has been regarded as an impetuous commander who, 'sharing the risks of his men ... risked the fortunes of his own kingdom', although the historical revisionism of some recent scholarship has disputed this verdict. (11) It is undeniable, however, that the defeat had a disastrous and long-lasting impact on Scottish morale, reducing the kingdom to the status of a pawn in international politics. The relief is inevitably a romanticised and idealised reconstruction of the battle, which was fought on the slopes of Branxton Hill, rather than on level ground as depicted. Surrey, an arthritic seventy-year-old, dominates the composition, and is portrayed as a dashing hero mounted on a charging white horse, holding his baton of command. To his left are the horsemen of Lord Dacre--another of Howard's forebears--and in the background are seen Lord Stanley's archers. To the right is the Scottish army, with James IV falling mortally wounded. His proximity to Surrey is not altogether inaccurate: James came within a spear's length of the Earl before he was killed, although this was not apparently recognised by the English at the time. (12)