Dress reform

Goldfish Pool

Goldfish Pool, 1861
Burne-Jones Gouache

William Morris’ design skills extended to dress. This model is wearing a dress which Morris designed for his future wife to wear in one of his paintings. The dress is unconventional for the time, but typical of the style popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites. The setting for this picture is possibly the Red House. Burne-Jones’ use of rich colours and his design for the frame owe much to Rossetti.

This is one of a series of beautiful women painted by Burne-Jones in the 1860s. It was commissioned by George Price Boyce in 1861. The model is sitting on the low wall of a pool filled with goldfish. William Morris designed the dress she is wearing for his future wife, Jane Burden, to pose in his paintings La Belle Iseult and Guinevere prior to their marriage in 1859. The setting for this picture is possibly William Morris’s new home - The Red House, Bexleyheath, Kent. The house was designed by Philip Webb in 1859 for Morris and his new wife Jane Burden.

Keeping to the medieval theme, Burne-Jones also designed medieval rosettes for the picture frame which was possibly made by his father, Edward Richard Jones.

This picture demonstrates Burne-Jones’s prime interest in colour. He used watercolour for much of his work in the 1860s because of the small scale it offered. Inspired by Rossetti’s unconventional technique he achieved a wide range of effects. He mixed watercolour with gum and scratched, sponged and blotted the wet colour.

Burne-Jones is a major late Pre-Raphaelite painter. This rare early watercolour has glowing jewel-like colours. The model is wearing an unconventional style of dress popularised by the Pre-Raphaelites.

There are these inscriptions on the exhibit:

E.B. Jones, this is a watercolour so don't varnish it
Girl in an Orchard by E Burne-Jones watercolour 11 3/8 inches x 8 3/8 inches

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery collection, bequest of Emily and Gordon Bottomley 1949

Aesthetic dress

Aesthetic dress was a fashion of the 1880s and 1890s consisting of mediaeval-like robes which were loose, unstructured and with little detail and few accessories or trimmings. The fashion was promoted as a more natural look for women in contrast to the artificial tiny waists and full bosoms of other fashions current at the time.

Excuse me as I venture into territory I know little about. But Franny Moyle in 'Constance' talks about her adopting Aesthetic dress because of the wives of the PRB such as Elizabeth Siddal and Jane Morris.

There depictions on canvas were copied by others. And off canvas they established new liberties, such as new kinds of dresses "with sleeves either sown on at the shoulder, rather than below it, or puffed and loose. While the rest of the Victorian populace had to go about with their arms pinned to the bodies in tight, unmoving sheaths, the Pre-Raphaelite women could move their arms freely, to paint or pose or simply be comfortable."

Their dress was both a style and a statement of a desire for more liberation.

Constance bought her dresses from Liberty's, started in 1875 by Arthur Liberty in London.

Liberty aesthetic dress in the V&A