There’s a babyish party named Burges
Who from infancy hardly emerges:
If you had not been told
He’s disgracefully old,
You’d offer a bull’s-eye to Burges.1

These lines by Dante Gabriel Rossetti have left us an incomplete portrait of the Gothic Revivalist architect William Burges (1827–1881), whose work has, until recently, received little attention beyond architectural circles. And yet, despite Rossetti’s scathing comment on his childish imagination, Burges was a fascinating figure which this issue of 19 aims to restore to his rightful place in the Victorian art world. Although Burges only completed a handful of architectural commissions during his short life — the most famous being St Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork and Lord Bute’s Cardiff Castle — he was indeed an extremely well connected and much respected ‘art-architect’ (as he and his friend E. W. Godwin styled themselves) who actively contributed to promoting the careers of major artists such as Simeon Solomon, Edward J. Poynter, and Albert Moore.

It was at King’s College School, London that Burges, the son of a wealthy marine engineer, most probably met Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti. In 1844 he became articled to Edward Blore, surveyor of Westminster Abbey, and joined the Ecclesiological Society, a crucial force in the Gothic Revival. Following Blore’s retirement in 1849, Burges joined the office of Matthew Digby Wyatt, who was at this time both an expert in the decorative arts of the Middle Ages and a public figure in debates concerning the application of fine art to industry. In 1851 Burges entered into a partnership with the architect Henry Clutton. One of their first joint projects was an entry for the international competition to design the cathedral of Notre-Dame de la Treille in Lille, which they won with plans that Eugène Viollet-le-Duc himself supposedly believed to have been thirteenth-century originals. However, the commission was never completed, the two men quarrelled, and, in 1857 Burges moved into his own offices at 15 Buckingham Street, London. There, as a neighbour to the painter George Price Boyce, he was introduced to influential literary and artistic figures such as Simeon Solomon, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne.

His tea parties in Buckingham Street, and later at Tower House in the artistic quarter of Melbury Road, his medievalized dream home to where he moved in 1878, were described by the critic Edmund Gosse as aesthetic meetings of art and life:

He used to give the quaintest little tea parties in his bare bachelor chambers, all very dowdy, but the meal served in beaten gold, the cream poured out of a single onyx, and the tea strictured in its descent on account of real rubies in the pot. He was much blinder than any near-sighted man I ever knew, and once, when with me in the country, mistook a peacock seen en face for a man. His work was really more jewel-work than architecture, just because he was so blind, but he had real genius, I am sure.²

Burges’s close relations with cosmopolitan Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes encouraged him to experiment with more collaborative and diverse art forms. From the 1850s to the 1870s, he made numerous trips to France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, and Greece which further shaped his unique, eclectic style. As evidenced by his library holdings and two hundred published essays, he also read extensively on the arts of Egypt, Japan, and Jerusalem.

Despite his fascination with the medieval past, Burges did not, therefore, live the life of a hermit in an ivory tower. Not only was he a highly respected and influential member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Archaeological Institute, and the Royal Academy, he also belonged to several clubs, including the Hogarth Club, the Arts Club, the Athenaeum, and the Arundel Club, to name but a few. Through such channels, Burges befriended a number of prominent writers and artists, whose names were carefully recorded in his ‘Abstract of Diaries’, alongside the list of his extensive travels. These succinct diaries (Fig. 1), compiled by an unknown clerk, partly compensate for the loss of his correspondence, highlighting the key moments in a career constantly enriched by artistic exchange.

Fig. 1: William Burges’s ‘Abstract of Diaries’, 1859. Facsimile kept at the Victoria and Albert Museum, National Art Library.

In keeping with the growing interest in ‘relational reading’ in Victorian studies,³ the purpose of this issue of 19 is to shed new light on Burges’s networks, connections, collaborations, and friendships as well as on the breadth of his erudition which Rossetti’s poem has partly contributed to downplaying. Relationality was also key to Burges’s conception of architecture which he believed was the ‘Great Art, entailing a knowledge […] of most of all the other arts’, including literature, upon which latter he was probably the only Victorian architect to draw so heavily.⁴ The desire to bring together the skills of artists of all types drove the collaborative dimension of most of his carefully documented decorative work, which emulated that of the medieval guilds so admired by John Ruskin:

It is possible that much might be effected by cooperation — such as the establishment of Guilds for the adornments of churches. By them we might hope to see the vacant niches of our cathedrals gradually repeopled with statues; the walls and windows of our City churches glow with colour.⁵

Perhaps the supreme manifestation of Burges’s extensive interests and collaborations is his Great Bookcase (Fig. 2). Made between 1859 and 1862 to house some of Burges’s impressive library on art, architecture, and poetry, this extraordinary and massive piece of furniture could be said to lie at the heart of the complex web of connections and interdisciplinary interests that make Burges such a unique and fascinating figure. Derided and often deeply misunderstood — much like Burges himself — the Great Bookcase’s complex and often baffling iconography and connections were only recently comprehensively deciphered and explained.⁶ Far from being just a particularly magnificent example of Gothic Revival painted furniture, the bookcase is now recognized as a remarkably coherent and highly sophisticated work of art that reflects Burges’s extraordinarily wide-ranging interests and erudition — not to mention his renowned wit and sense of humour. Central to this was, of course, his network of friends and colleagues for whom, and perhaps only for whom, the elaborate iconography of the bookcase was meant to appeal. One can imagine that Burges was amused that those outside his circle demonstrated their own ignorance by failing to fully understand the bookcase’s more obscure references and seemingly uncoordinated decorative scheme. The very fabric of the bookcase is itself a reflection of Burges’s connections, as it was painted by thirteen young artists from within his own network, including Simeon Solomon, Stacey Marks, and Henry Holiday. Although this was the most extensive collaboration ever undertaken by Burges on a single work of art, it is certain that he retained tight control over the entire scheme. Burges’s own plan of the bookcase, together with annotated tracings of the painted panels, survives. These identify the subjects of the panels and the artists who painted them. The doors are painted with panels depicting the Christian and pagan arts: poetry, architecture, painting and sculpture, with Christian themes on the left and pagan themes on the right, referencing the subjects of the books housed within.

Fig. 2: William Burges, Great Bookcase (1859–62), pine, carved, painted and gilt, 317.5 × 173.9 × 49.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, WA1933.26.

Made originally for Burges’s offices at Buckingham Street, the bookcase was subsequently moved in 1878 to Tower House, Burges’s newly completed Gothic home. It remained in the library at Tower House until 1933 when the contents of the house were sold. Remarkably, the bookcase was purchased for the Ashmolean Museum by a young Kenneth Clark during his brief tenure as keeper of art at the Ashmolean during the early 1930s. Purchased for fifty pounds, the bookcase was a particularly far-sighted and pioneering acquisition at a time when Victorian art and architecture was almost universally despised and derided. Clark himself acknowledged this when he wrote that although the bookcase was

not acceptable to present taste it will always remain an important document in the history of the [Pre-Raphaelite] movement and a minor realization of the ideals behind such projects as the decoration of the Library of the Oxford Union and the building of the University Museum.⁷

Although Clark almost certainly intended that the bookcase would be shown together with the Ashmolean’s important collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, it was clearly felt too High Victorian for ‘present taste’. Instead, it was banished to Knightshayes Court, an unfinished Burges house in Devon where it remained for decades. It was only in 2016 that the bookcase was finally displayed in the Ashmolean, more than eighty years after it had been first acquired. The bookcase now forms the magnificent central focus of the Barrie and Deedee Wigmore Gallery of nineteenth-century art, as Kenneth Clark had originally intended. It was this return of the bookcase to the Ashmolean that prompted new collaborative research and reassessment of Burges’s work that was to culminate in the academic conference ‘Burges and Friends’ held in Oxford in June 2023. A selection of the papers presented at this conference are published in this issue. We are grateful to Barrie and Deedee Wigmore for so generously supporting the conference and this publication.

Research on the bookcase, including pigment analysis, was a key element of ‘Chromotope’ a five-year ERC funded project that explores the changes that took place in attitudes to colour in the nineteenth century, and notably how the ‘chromatic turn’ of the 1850s mapped out new ways of thinking about colour in literature, art, science, and technology throughout Europe. Chromotope is a multi-institutional partnership between the Sorbonne and Oxford University, with the support of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam). The bookcase was included in the major exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design’, held at the Ashmolean Museum (September 2023–January 2024) that was one of the major outcomes of the Chromotope project. In the exhibition, the bookcase brought together key strands explored, further emphasizing its importance and position at the centre of Burges’s extraordinary network and the ‘Victorian Colour Revolution’.⁸

The articles collected in this issue of 19 aim to shed new light on this unique network and more broadly on Burges’s belief in the art of ‘cooperation’. Many of the articles draw on the foundational work of J. Mordaunt Crook whose 1981 study, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, first introduced the vast matrix of influences upon and influence of Burges in the nineteenth century. Crook wrote that

Burges is the hero of this book, the most dazzling exponent of the High Victorian Dream. Pugin conceived the dream, but never lived to see it; Rossetti and Burne-Jones painted it; Tennyson sang its glories; Ruskin and Morris formulated its philosophy; but only Burges built it.⁹

This issue builds on Crook’s scholarship, and that of Charles Handley-Read who gathered much of its primary material, but notably departs from them in its assessment of Burges as far more than the label of ‘art-architect’ can accommodate. As we push beyond the architectural confines of understanding Burges, we find ourselves surrounded by the rich variety of art objects Burges produced. Articles address his commissions for furniture, silverware and jewellery, designs for costume and the theatre, illustrations, watercolours, and his collections of Japanese prints and antiquarian books.

This issue also situates itself beyond architectural history as the primary lens through which to see Burges’s contributions. It brings together scholars from the worlds of literature, art history, collections history, postcolonial studies, and theology to reflect on Burges’s relevance to Victorian studies as a whole. This has resulted in generative cross-disciplinary readings such as literary interpretations of furniture and theological reflections on architecture. Articles offer expanded definitions on key terms in the field such as cosmopolitanism and eclecticism to analyse Burges’s absorption of japonisme, Orientalism, the Middle Ages, and the biblical past and his careful articulation of those influences in his work. Ayla Lepine gives a new reading of Burges’s depictions of Christ and Eucharistic symbolism to fuse medieval visual theology with Victorian experiences of grief, consolation, and the hope of resurrection. Katrina-Eve Nasidlowski Manica offers polycultural as a useful term to encompass Burges’s ability to synthesize art and design across cultures, time periods, and different media.

This issue also identifies, and explores in depth for the first time, poetry as a rich source for Burges. Anna Barton takes up Burges’s visual exegesis of Tennyson’s poetry, focusing on materiality in interpreting the poet’s work in illustration and furniture decoration. In turn, the love of Tennyson spurred on Burges’s friendship with the young Algernon Swinburne, as Catherine Maxwell details.

The ‘sit-com’ style of our title, ‘Burges and Friends’, is intended to suggest the convivial and sociable reputation Burges held among his peers. Charlotte Ribeyrol’s previous research has brought to light, in the yearly abstracts for his sadly untraced diaries, lists of visitors, representing a diverse network which spanned nineteenth-century society. Burges’s decision to build his home, Tower House, in fashionable Holland Park, with neighbours such as Frederic Leighton, George Frederic Watts, and the Prinsep and Ionides families, reveals a desire to be at the centre of a highly networked artistic social order. Catherine Maxwell’s article extends these networks beyond artists and architects. She maps out the club memberships Burges shared with Swinburne, including the voluntary military corps and the Artists’ Rifles.

Certain figures orbit Burges throughout his lifetime. Some are more familiar than others. Susan Weber explores ‘the Castor and Pollux of architecture’, Burges and E. W. Godwin, and their asymmetrical relationship which spanned the dominant trends of nineteenth-century British architecture. On the other hand, Jessica Insley shifts attention from John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, a looming figure in Burges scholarship, on to the lesser-known but equally productive collaborations Burges shared with his wife, Lady Gwendolen. Burges also played the role of nurturing older mentor to many young male artists. The work of Henry Holiday, Burges’s long-time collaborator in wall and furniture paintings as well as stained glass, is analysed across several articles. Holiday’s prolific contribution to Victorian art has recently been explored in relation to his stained-glass designs executed in America, but this issue highlights that his wider body of work is still in need of further consideration. Similarly, the work of Burges’s students such as Josiah Conder and Tatsuno Kingo which appears in Stefano Evangelista and Charlotte Ribeyrol’s article, demonstrates the international, cross-generational reach of their master and the need to reconsider Burges in global studies of the nineteenth century, so as to further challenge Rossetti’s jibe at his supposedly infantile fancies.

Notes

1. No. 4 of Rossetti’s Nonsense Verses, quoted in Matthew Williams, William Burges (Jarrold, 2004), p. 19. [^{^}]
2. Letter to Austin Dobson, 23 April 1881, in Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (Heinemann, 1931), pp. 147–48 (p. 147). [^{^}]
3. Talia Schaffer, ‘Relational Reading’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 51.2 (2023), pp. 343–50, doi:10.1017/S1060150323000128. [^{^}]
4. W. Burges, ‘Books on Medieval Costume’, Building News, 8 August 1879, pp. 143–45 (p. 143). [^{^}]
5. William Burges, ‘Art and Religion’, in The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1868, ed. by Rev. Orby Shipley (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868), pp. 574–98 (p. 598). On Burges’s chromophilia, see Charlotte Ribeyrol, William Burges’s Great Bookcase & the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023). [^{^}]
6. See Matthew Winterbottom, ‘Not Acceptable to Present Taste: William Burges’s Great Bookcase’, Decorative Arts Society Journal, 41 (2017), pp. 14–25 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44605882> [accessed 11 January 2026]; and Ribeyrol, William Burges’s Great Bookcase. [^{^}]
7. Kenneth Clark, Annual Report of the Ashmolean Museum (1933), pp. 24–25. [^{^}]
8. See Charlotte Ribeyrol and others, Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design (Ashmolean Museum, 2023). [^{^}]
9. J. Mordaunt Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream, rev. edn (Frances Lincoln, 1981), p. 34. [^{^}]