The Child Miranda, 1864. Watercolour and gouache on paper, 14 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches (37.5 x 27.3 cm). Private collection. Click on image to enlarge it.
This work was strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement. John Christian sees the influence of John Ruskin “not only in the emphasis on naturalistic detail, passion-flowers and shells, but in the picture’s celebration of the beauty and innocence of youth…it suggests that Burton was deeply responsive to the appeal of childhood, subscribing to a cult which numbered Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Leighton, and other eminent Victorians among its devotees.” Christian also notes that “at the same time, the picture’s composition and central motif – a female beauty with long crimped hair, seen half-length against a floral backdrop – owe an unmistakable debt to Rossetti. The watercolour conforms to a pattern that Rossetti repeated time and time again in his later work” (59).
Boca Baciata. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. . 1859. Oil on panel, 12 ⅝ x 10⅝inches (32.1 x 27 cm). Exhibited 1860. Collection of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, accession no. 1980.261.
Rossetti began his Venetian Renaissance-inspired half-length female fancy pictures with Boca Baciata in 1859 and continued this pattern, particularly throughout the 1860s. Although Burton’s picture is supposedly derived from Shakespeare, and even shows a fairy likely representing Ariel in the left background, it is much more a painting exhibiting Aesthetic values than it is a narrative painting illustrating The Tempest. There are also enigmatic symbolic references present in the painting that are not fully understood. In the Victorian language of flowers the passion flowers seen in the background could represent refusal or religious superstition. What is one to make of the child’s curious gesture of blessing with her right hand that is more normally seen in Renaissance paintings of Christ as Salvator Mundi? There is no doubt, however, that this is one of Burton’s most beautiful and important paintings.
When this work was shown at the O.W.S. in 1864 it was accompanied in the catalogue by a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act III, Scene 2: “The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.” Although Burton’s principal submission to the Old Water Colour Society of 1864, Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, did not receive universal praise the critics were uniformly impressed by this work. F. G. Stephens writing in The Athenaeum commented:
“Burton’s third picture pleases us more than the others. – The Child Miranda (339); its sober and powerful colour proves the painter’s knowledge of that element of Art; its modelling of flesh leaves nothing to be wished; the hair has less solidity than is desirable from so accomplished a painter. To appreciate the feeling for expression of a subtle kind displayed, the reader must study the picture. In that respect it is triumphant. [617]
The critic for The Illustrated London News also greatly admired this picture: “Another drawing, by Mr. Burton, of ‘The Child Miranda’ (339), shell-bedecked, and holding a nautilus-shell she has perhaps just placed to her ear, sitting listening to the enchanted ‘noises and sweet airs’ of her island home, is as graceful in fancy as it is masterly in execution” (430). The critic for The Spectator stated: “’The Child Miranda’ (339) a beautiful half entranced girl who has been communing with the sound of music that slumbers in a shell” (537). Tom Taylor writing in The Times praised Burton’s The Child Miranda and L’Ecuyer, two “highly finished heads, mainly remarkable for the purity of style and perfection of their workmanship” (14).
Bibliography
Christian, John. Important British and Irish Art. London: Christie’s (November 11, 1999): lot 21, 56-59 (supplement).
Stephens, Frederic George. “Society of Painters in Water Colours.” The Athenaeum No. 1905 (April 30, 1864): 617-18.
“Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colours.” The Illustrated London News 44 (April 30, 1864): 430-31.
“Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Water Colour Society.” The Spectator 37 (May 7, 1864): 536-37.
Taylor, Tom. The Times, (April 25, 1864): 14.
Last modified 12 April 2022