"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.