The Bride's Burial [The Burial of Juliet], by G. A. Storey R.A. (1834-1919). Oil on canvas. 41 x 34 inches (104.1 x 86.4 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Sotheby's. [Click on this image, and the ones below, to enlarge them.]
When this painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859, no. 831, it was accompanied in the catalogue by these lines from the first sonnet in Chapter VII of Dante's Vita Nuova:
Mark now what honour she received from love;
I saw him leaning o'er her beauteous corpse,
Lamenting in sincerity of grief;
And of the cast a wistful look to heaven,
Where now that gentle spirit finds its rest,
That lady was of countenance so gay."
Despite acknowledging Dante as the source of inspiration for the picture, interestingly on an old label on the back of the stretcher were eight lines from Romeo and Juliet. In his recollections Storey himself refers to the painting as both The Bride's Burial and The Burial of Juliet. Shakespeare was a major source of inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelites, as was Dante in the case of D. G. Rossetti, which suggests Storey perhaps had some familiarity with his work. What is most unusual, however, is that Storey has chosen to depict the scene using children. As John Christian has noted: "This introduces a note of frivolity that is very un-Pre-Raphaelite and more in keeping with conventional Victorian genre" (26).
In the painting the dead bride is seen lying on a stretcher dressed in a medieval black gown with a red overmantel that is strewn with flowers, primarily white suggestive of her purity. Her head rests on a blue pillow and her arms are folded across her breasts. A young man in a red tunic, likely her husband, bends over to kiss her forehead. The bride is surrounded by other children, including a raven-haired girl dressed in a yellow gown with a purple surcoat to her right and another girl with a light blue dress trimmed in darker blue to her left. A monk, dressed in a brown cowl, and holding a lighted taper, stands directly behind the latter girl. A red escutcheon hangs from his candle. Two younger children stand to the left. The meticulous detail seen in the handling of the foliage in the foreground and background is worthy of the best of early Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting. A simple church with its bell tower is seen in the mid-background surrounded by trees.
Sketch for The Bride’s Burial, c.1859. Watercolour on paper, 8 3/4 x 7 1/4 inches (22.2 x 18.4 cm), in the collection of Tate Britain, reference no. NO4109 (image courtesy of the Art Fund).
The major influence on this work was J. E. Millais's Autumn Leaves that Storey had seen at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1856 and greatly admired. The influence of Millais's painting on its composition and palette is even more obvious in the early sketch than the finished painting. In his reminiscences Storey recalled the effect on young painters of the early work of Millais:
Notwithstanding much fault-finding these works sent all the younger men to nature, and had they done nothing else, they would have done more than all the lecturers, art-masters, art-critics, and the rest of our guides put together. But they did more than this, so it seems to me; they woke a new interest in art, showing that it is a living thing continually growing and throwing out new forms and fashions and ideas, new interpretations of nature, new combinations of colour, and new methods of workmanship … Millais' admirers did not copy Millais's pictures, they only tried to copy nature as he did. [105-06]
Storey acknowledged his own debt to Millais in his Sketches from Memory: "Some three or four years after my 'ugly group,' [A Family Portrait] and after seeing Millais' most poetical Autumn Leaves, I painted The Bride's Burial, or The Burial of Juliet, a picture that was lately exhibited at Messrs. Shepherd's gallery, and of which several critics said some kind things" (106).
When the work was exhibited at the Royal Academy the critic of The Athenaeum found it an improvement over his previous submissions: "Mr. A. Storey [sic], in his Bride's Burial (831), is not very happy in his story, but his painting gets firmer, and in every way better" (683).
Percy Bate in his The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters published in 1910 included this painting as one of the works that showed Pre-Raphaelitism as a phase in Storey's early career. Bate also noted Storey's indebtedness to Millais: "The rich colour and close technique of these beautiful works betray the artist's admiration of the earlier pictures of Millais, and though this phase of inspiration has passed, the painter's canvases show to-day that the influence was, in his case, by no means an ephemeral one" (87-88).
Bibliography
19th Century European Art. London: Sotheby's. (6 November 2014), lot 51.
Bate, Percy. The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1910.
Christian, John. Victorian & British Impressionist Pictures. London: Christie's (December 15, 2010), lot 40, 26-27.
"Fine Arts. Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1647 (21 May 1859): 682-84.
Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters. The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection. London: The Royal Academy of Arts (2003): cat. 75, 111.
Storey, G. A. Sketches from Memory. London: Chatto and Windus, 1899.
Created 23 September 2023