Edward Coley Burne-Jones (28 August 1833-98) was admired as one of the greatest artists of Victorian Britain. In 1877, art critic and novelist Henry James thought Burne-Jones a remarkable colourist, although many of his works of the 1890s displayed a strong tendency for monochrome. ‘In the palace of art there are many chambers, and that of which Mr. Burne-Jones holds the key is a wondrous museum. His imagination, his fertility of invention, his exquisiteness of work, his remarkable gifts as a colourist—all these things constitute a brilliant distinction’.
The Gallery’s painting Aurora 1896 was purchased in 1954, however recently the painting was re-framed as it was most probably intended.
Why re-frame ‘Aurora’?
Where appropriate, re-framing is undertaken to return an art work to its original social and historic context. As a member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones placed particular emphasis on the framing of his paintings, he designed and used three distinctive styles of frames, however there is no evidence that Aurora entered the Gallery’s Collection in its original frame. As with many paintings, the original frame had been removed and replaced with a different style, this common practice of re-framing art works may be attributed to financial and aesthetic considerations, including denoting ownership or harmonising with a certain interior design.
‘Aurora’ re-framed
Edward Coley Burne-Jones
Burne-Jones was closely associated with the latter phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, a group of English painters, poets and critics, founded in 1848 inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He met English designer and writer William Morris at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1852 and in 1861 became a founding member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., which specialised in the design and production of stained glass, tapestries, fabric, wallpaper and carpets. Burne-Jones was enamoured of classical poetry, literature, mythology and Arthurian legend, which provided the sources for many of his designs and paintings.
From the early 1870s, following his third visit to Italy, Burne-Jones was influenced by the paintings of the Italian Quattrocento – particularly those by Botticelli and Mantegna – which can be seen in works such as Aurora 1896, first exhibited at the New Gallery, London, in the same year.
Aurora, the Roman mythical personification of dawn, is here depicted barefoot and with cymbals to wake the sleeping city as a soft dawn light rises behind rooftops and distant trees. It is likely that Burne-Jones’s interpretation of Aurora is based on a reading of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem Tithonus, which relates the tragic story of Aurora’s Greek iteration, Eos. Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn, took mortal lovers, one of whom was Tithonus, Prince of Troy. She asked that Zeus grant him immortality, which he did, but without the attendant gift of eternal youth. Tithonus aged and withered as Eos continued to herald the sun each day. In Tennyson’s poem, Tithonus’s immortality is granted by Aurora herself.
Like other Pre-Raphaelite artists, Burne-Jones used contemporary models for his mythical subjects and imbued them with classical attributes. The face of Aurora in this work is an idealised portrait of Bessie Keene, one of the artist’s models. The background path appears to have been developed from a sketch of a canal near the railway bridge at Oxford made during a family holiday in 1867. The buildings, however, are fanciful and consistent with the atmosphere of dreamlike unreality that pervades Burne-Jones’s work.
To re-frame ‘Aurora’
What is an appropriate frame
Once the decision was made to re-frame Aurora, research into the style of frame Burne-Jones used during this period began. Many galleries, both here in Australia and overseas, were contacted for advice and information.
With the assistance of the Head of Frame Conservation at the Tate Gallery in London, the Tabernacle 1 style was selected as that most likely used by the artist for his mythical subjects during the 1890s. Based on Renaissance altar pieces, Burne-Jones’s Tabernacle frames consist of a plain sight edge2 with decorated frieze. The back edge has carved egg and dart moulding with taenia3. The top of the frame has a double cornice4, and the bottom has a predella5. A decision was made not to include the carved egg and dart moulding, and the double cornice and predella, on the reproduction frame. It was thought these elements would overpower the art work.
The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, also played an important role in the re-framing of Aurora. The painting The Wheel of Fortune 1871-85 in its collection, also by Burne-Jones, retains parts of its original frame, it has a compo frieze6 consisting of a running floral pattern. Using silicon rubber, this frieze pattern from the NGV frame was duplicated to reproduce an exact copy of the compo ornament.
The creation of a new frame
The methods employed to make the reproduction frame for Aurora are similar to the techniques used by picture framers for the past 500 years. All elements of the new frame were made in the Gallery’s conservation framing workshop.
Queensland white beech (Gmelina fasciculiflora) was used for the sub-frame, which was lap joined for additional strength. White beech was also used for the mouldings on the sight and back edge of the frame, the mouldings were then fastened to the sub-frame with glue and nails. The frame received eight coats of gesso7, and was sanded, then a red bole8 was applied to the sanded gesso. Next, the sight and back edge of the frame were water gilt9 in 23-carat gold leaf, then all the compo was pressed and cleaned.
The compo was then attached to the frieze. The compo and frieze were oil gilt9 also in 23-carat gold leaf. The frame was left to dry for a week, then toned and given a patina to simulate age. Finally, the painting was removed from its old frame and fitted into the new one.
Robert Zilli is Conservation Framer, QAGOMA
Glossary
1 Tabernacle | Tabernacle frames are based on classical aedicular architecture. An aedicular frame is classical in style and is characterised by an opening framed by two columns, with a decorated entablature lying horizontally above the columns, and usually with a pediment forming the top element of the frame.
2 Sight (edge) | Sight (edge) refers to that part of the frame moulding nearest to the framed object.
3 Taenia | Taenia refers to the flat, undecorated, raised band of moulding on a frame.
4 Cornice | Cornice refers to the set of crowning moldings that cap an entablature.
5 Predella | Predella is the platform or step on which an altar stands. In painting, predella refers to the paintings or sculptures running along the frame at the bottom of an altarpiece. They often consist of narrative scenes, for example, scenes in the life of a particular saint.
6 Compo | Composition, or compo, is a traditional picture framing material which is used as an alternative to carving to make decoration on frames. When heated, compo is soft enough to be pressed into decorative moulds. When cooled it becomes hard and durable. Compo is made from animal (hide) glue, whiting (chalk), linseed oil and colophony.
7 Gesso | Gesso is a mixture of ground chalk and animal glue traditionally used on wood as a preparation layer prior to oil painting and gilding.
8 Bole | Bole is a clay-like substance which is red, brown or yellow in colour. It is a mixture of water and glue and is painted on to a gessoed frame to form the undercoat for the application of gold leaf.
9 Water/oil gilt | Water/oil gilt is the application technique where gold leaf is applied to a gesso and bole base using water as the mordant or glue. Water gilt surfaces are able to be highly polished compared to oil gilt surfaces (oil used as mordant) which cannot be polished.
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