"Genius and poor health": Burne-Jones, Browning and Rudel

One might think the Rudel legend would have been much taken up by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, given that movement’s obsession with medieval themes and a certain kind of florid melancholy. But such showings are relatively rare. There’s the odd Pre-Raph-adjacent figure like Swinburne, who swam around in the languid Rudelian currents and emerged with a few stanzas to stitch into The Triumph of Time, but no tasteful canvases by the likes of Waterhouse or Rossetti.

The closest we seem to get is a roughly illustrated, handwritten copy of Browning’s ‘Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli’ (one of the treatments of the legend included in the Outremer book, folks) by Edward Burne-Jones. Here it is.

(Source: https://eb-j.org/browse-artwork-detail/MjIwODc=) 

It appears in the Little Holland House Album, a volume compiled by Burne-Jones around 1859 for Sophia Dalrymple, one of the seven Pattle sisters whose social circle based at Little Holland House in Kensington included Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Burne-Jones’ teacher and idol Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The young Burne-Jones was adopted by members of the circle, especially another Pattle sister, Sarah Prinsep, who, in the apt words of an auctioneer’s recent blurb, “found his combination of genius and poor health irresistible”. He spent several months at Little Holland House, “ostensibly to recover from illness but probably also to remove him from the ambience of Rossetti”.

The Pattle salon seems to represent a bridge between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Bloomsbury Group: Sarah Prinsep’s daughter, Julia Prinsep Jackson, married twice, the second time to Leslie Stephen, and their children included Virginia and Vanessa, later to become Woolf and Bell respectively.

And so the tradition of alighting on Rudel as a vehicle for a fit of fragile self-expression continues. Genius and poor health – a killer combination.

Le Style Troubadour

'The troubadour style'? No, me neither. But here's how I came across the term.

While bimbling online, I came across the image above: an illustration from an unidentified book captioned 'Le comptesse de Tripoli et le troubadour Rudel. - 3me croisade 1888'. At the bottom left, the name CELESTIN NANTEUIL; at bottom right, LACOSTE AINE.

Célestin Nanteuil (1813-1873) was a not insignificant figure in the late Romantic period, a painter, printmaker and illustrator who was apprenticed with Dominique Ingres and became known as 'the Romantic engraver par excellence'. Another website mentions that he was 'a friend to such great novelists and writers as Alfred de Musset, Theophile Gauthier, Roger de Beauvoir and (most particularly) Victor Hugo, and illustrated many of their works with his fine etchings and lithographs'.

A bit more digging yields a reference to his nowadays being 'linked to the style called Troubadour', although 'preceded in this field by the brothers Deveria and especially by Alfred and Tony Johannot'. It would take a more assiduous researcher than me to tease out some of these art-historical strands, but 'Le Style Troubadour' is clearly A Thing. It has its own Wikipedia entry, for starters.

The description there talks of 'idealised depictions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance'; the French art historian Henry Havard (1838-1921) had a bit of a dig when he waxed Gallic about 'that heterogeneous style which signals, to the indignation of all good people, the beginning of our century and which has been derisively called the troubadour style.' Notes for an exhibition in 2014, meanwhile, considered it a genre 'very popular with the general public but whose presentations are extremely rare'; a style that 'seduces as much as it can raise a smile through the staging of minor pages of History [...] and the valorisation of feelings', and adds: 'It was launched at the very beginning of the 19th century, in reaction to the neoclassical painters [...] with immense canvases where the heroes of Antiquity crush the unfortunate visitor under their assaults'.

The same notes evoke 'romantic crypts, forgotten lovers and fantastic castles' - and we begin to see where the appeal of the Rudel legend lay for the likes of Nanteuil. But this illustration is hardly the work of an 'engraver par excellence'; it more resembles a ropey effort accompanying a 1910s boys' own adventure story. Melisande in particular is bringing a 'pissed-off matron' energy to the tableau.

The culprit, of course, is not Nanteuil but the bottom-right-hand name: 'Lacoste aîné'. This is most likely Louis Conil Lacoste (1774-1837), patriarch of a family of Parisian wood-engravers whose work, according to the British Museum, is 'difficult to distinguish' one from the other. Le Style Famille, you could say. One assumes Lacoste was rendering from an original engraving or painting by Nanteuil, but I've been unable to find it.

Outremer: thirty years later

It only recently occurred to me that 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of our slim volume, Outremer. Several things have transpired since 1994, not least the advent, almost immediately, of the internet, making my trips to the British Library and expenditure on microfiche copies of several works a quaint detail from the analogue era. But I want to talk about something both more recent and closer to home - something that I'm still processing, along with many others.

Marcus Sedgwick - my dear friend, collaborator and illustrator - tragically passed away in November 2022. Marcus and his elder brother Julian were schoolfriends of mine: together we endured the school's dysfunctional regime of unchecked, mildly psychotic bullying, but my frequent visits to their family home were always a mind-opening joy. This was thanks not only to them but to their father, Geoffrey, who was a force in the adult education world and a man who, despite his sometimes bluff teacherly Lancashire manner, unfailingly took interest in anyone who seemed to have something going on in their synapses - a life of the mind, as it were. He died in 1988, and would surely have been immensely proud of Marcus and Julian's subsequent careers as writers. 

Marcus was mostly an illustrator back then, and produced some lino prints for Outremer that I think have an exquisite minimalism. He was a big admirer of the work of print artists like William Blake and Eric Ravilious and, perhaps above all, the writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake. Here are a couple of his Outremer illustrations, done no favours by my smartphone camera.

This stone angel is probably my favourite: a touch of folk horror
that he went on to explore in novels like Witch Hill. 

 

 The sunflower was a device sometimes used by troubadours,
and is explicitly mentioned in Browning's
'Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli'. 

 

Marcus started his writing career in earnest around the same time that we published Outremer, which was printed by a small company in Cambridge; he collected the 500 copies himself, and we shared the duties of hand-numbering each one.

And here we are, thirty years later. Except that he's not. Marcus is hugely missed.