Artist:

SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES BT ARA (1833-1898)

Title:

A Bathing Beauty ( 1895 )

Medium:

Pencil on paper

Signed:

A pair, one inscribed EMMA FRANK

Dimensions:

11.50cm wide   17.50cm high (4.53 inches wide  6.89 inches high)

Provenance:

Bertram Willes Dayrell Brooke, H. H. The Tuan Muda of Sarawak, drawn for him by the artist; to his wife:
Gladys Brooke, H. H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak; by descent in the family to:
Lady Bryant
Sotheby's Belgravia, 29th June 1976, Lot 246

Literature:

H. H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak, Relations and Complications, 1929, page 98
- Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne Jones Interlacing, London 2008, page 159, illustrations 89-90

Exhibition:

London, Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries, The Brotherhood of Ruralists and the Pre-Raphaelites, June - July 2005

Description:

Burne-Jones was fascinated by what he called prominent women. The drawings represent Emma Frank, a lady with the Last Supper tattooed on her back, who Burne-Jones became fascinated with during a trip to the Brighton Aquarium. In her book Relations and Complications, Gladys Brook, The Dayang Muda of Sarawak, mentions how Edward Burne-Jones drew Emma Frank for her husband Bertram Brooke (The Tuan Muda of Sarawak) during the artist’s visits to his house.

These visits of Swinburne during the Tuan Muda's illness were interspersed by those of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. He came frequently in the afternoon, after his walks or when he had returned from the city, and on several occasions he drew pictures to distract my future husband. Some of these I am reproducing: they will have a durable interest, for they have never seen the light of publicity. One of the first was a caricature of my husband walking down to bathe. Another day Sir Edward, who had been to the Aquarium during the afternoon, came back and drew for Tuan Muda a fat woman he had observed there with the scene of the Last Supper tattooed across her broad back..... Another day he again gave vent to his animosity and drew two fat women whom he disliked intensely - caricatures which he said were real.... The sketches will throw a light on Sir Edwards personal character; as he executed each drawing at my husband's bedside he would recount at length the story of its inspiration. These stories my husband used often to repeat to me, looking over again the drawings, which he counts among his greatest treasures.

He also shared this joke with his confident Mary Gaskell who sentimentally recalls in a letter of October 1938 how she met Burne-Jones at a dinner party where they had laughed together about Emma Frank the tattooed lady. I found myself sitting next to Burne-Jones…He remarked “I have seen Mrs Gaskell, a sight today that you have never seen.” “What?” I asked. “The Tattooed lady he gravely replied” “Have you? I cried, isn’t she wonderful. I saw her years ago” “So did I”, he said, “and went again today!” From this dinner party of happy laughter grew a perfect friendship that ended only with death. In his letters to Mary he frequently discusses Emma and her tattooing and drew her several times.

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