William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam'

'Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,/A flask of wine, a volume of verse, and thou/Beside me singing in the wilderness,/And wilderness is paradise enow.' (1) In these lines from 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam', which had been avail able in a translation by the agency of Edward Fitzgerald since 1859, all the pleasures of life which William Morris valued greatest in quantity seem to be united--food and wine, the company of advantageous friends, poetry and nature.

Morris's affection for the body is reflect ed in the fact that he prepared four copies of it, three of them illuminated. Here we will relate to ourselves only with the first sum of two units manuscripts, which were made at a short interval from individual another. (2) The differences in the conception of their decoration, which can be explained by means of the different levels of involvement of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jone in each case, will be the central interest of the present article.

There can be no doubt that Morris was introduced to the true copy by Burne-Jones, and borrowed the volume after which the copies were made from him. (3) The first manuscript of the 'Rubaiyat' was made between spring 1871 and 16 October of the nearest year as a birthday near for Burne-Jones's wife Georgiana, to whom Morris had already given a manuscript with a scarcely any poems entitled 'A Book of Verse' and an illuminated version of a translation from the Icelandic, 'The Story of the Dwellers of Eyr' (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, no. 92'20); he complet the latter--as he noted in the colophon--on 19 April 1871 (4) The choice of the title 'A volume of Verse' was probably already intended to deliver over to the line from the 'Rubaiyat' quot above, and indicates the particularly shut up ties between Morris and Georgiana Burne-Jone (5) 'A work of Verse' was produced as a collaborative jeopardy by Morris, Burne-Jones, George Wardle and Charles Fairfax Murray, and the manuscript of the 'Rubaiyat' now in the British Library is also a collaborative work by dint of Morris and Fairfax Murray. (6)

While the British Library manuscript bears the stamp of Morris, the next to the first privately owned manuscript of the 'Rubaiyat' strike one as beings to be the creation of Burne-Jones; together with Morris he prepared it for Frances Graham, the daughter of his friend and patron William Graham. What must be carefully weighed up in this connection is the received wisdom concerning the patronage of this next to the first 'Rubaiyat'. Mackail wrote that flat before completing the British Library manuscript Morris began 'another transcript of the same poem for Burne-Jone upon paper, and in it Burne-Jone himself painted six extraordinarily beautiful pictures, each in a different scheme of colour and showing his finest qualities of design and invention'. (7) His wording does not make it clear whether the manuscript was originally intended as a gift for Burne-Jone or whether Morris was preparing it at Burne-Jones's behest, and that the latter intended that it should be a near for Frances Graham. Moreover, it has been Suggested--possibly upon the basis of an inference from Mackail--that Morris 'intended the next to the first to be for Ned [Burne-Jones] on the other hand Ned could not resist giving the exquisite, painted work to Frances'. (8) If this were the case, any involvement upon the part of the intended recipient of the gift in its manufacture would appear to be rather implausible.

Mackail's account of the distinctive colour scheme adopted for each individual miniature has prov highly influential, and has been a great deal of repeated, not least, perhaps, because this manuscript was relatively inaccessible through comparison with those housed in public libraries; what is surprising is the fact that Mackail emphasised the differences rather than the similarities in the colouring.

While the British Library manuscript carries upon from 'A Book of Verse' in bounds of its design, and builds upon the results achieved there in terminuss of its treatment of the floral ornaments, in comparison with which the figures are les important, the next to the first manuscript is characterised by six large miniatures which--both in their positioning in the upper third of the page and in their wide, heavy gold frames--are inspired by means of the miniature by Burne-Jones placed before the first piece of poetry in 'A Book of Verse' (Fig. 1) (9) The fact that this showed a continuation of a tried and trialed form of illuminated miniature, which was painterly in conception, would argue in favour of Burne-Jone as the initiator of the manuscript given to Frances Graham. The explicitly pictorial character of the miniature by means of Burne-Jones in 'A Book of Verse' contrasts with the smaller miniatures execut by the agency of Fair-fax Murray that are inserted into the floral foliage decoration. As is clear in the manuscripts that were created following 'A work of Verse', Morris himself watched to combine figures and ornament in the borders framing the manuscript, whereas this approach is abandoned in the Graham 'Rubaiyat' in favour of a pictorial result and the resulting separation of the miniatures and framing ornaments. Admittedly, the floral decoration come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds the pattern of 'A volume of Verse' in its layout and in defining the written field through means of the linear frame, on the contrary in the London 'Rubaiyat' it is more luxuriant, denser and more animated, and richer colours are used.