Frederic William Burton

Biography

In 2012 the Irish public was asked to choose the country’s favourite painting from ten works shortlisted by critics. The winner was a watercolour of 1864: on a tower staircase two lovers, Hellelil and Hildebrand, the figures of a medieval Danish ballad, are taking leave of each other. Its author was Frederic William Burton.

He was born on 8 April 1816 in County Wicklow, the third son of Samuel Frederick Burton and his wife, Hannah Mallett. At the age of six his parents took him to County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland. The old Burton family seat, Clifden House near Corofin, had been built in the middle of the eighteenth century. The artist’s grandfather, Major Edward William Burton, was High Sheriff of County Clare in 1799.

Burton was educated in Dublin. At twenty-one he was elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and two years later an academician. He began, it seems, with portraits, scenes of country life and Irish landscapes; to this period belongs “The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child” (1841), one of his best-known watercolours. From 1842 he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London. In the same year he travelled to Germany and Bavaria, the first of many journeys around Europe on which he studied the work of the Old Masters. From 1851 he spent seven years working as a painter at the court of Maximilian II of Bavaria.

He worked with the archaeologist George Petrie, making archaeological sketches for him, and sat on the council of the Royal Irish Academy and the Archaeological Society of Ireland. In his youth he sympathised with the Young Ireland party.

In 1855 Burton was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, and in 1856 a full member. In London he came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelites, and this shows in his watercolours of those years. He resigned from the society in 1870 and in 1886 was readmitted, this time as an honorary member.

“The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” was painted after a ballad translated into English in 1855 by Burton’s friend Whitley Stokes. Hellelil loves Prince Hildebrand; her father disapproves of the match and orders his seven sons to kill him. Burton chose the moment before the outcome: two figures on a staircase, still together.

In 1874 he succeeded Sir William Boxall as director of the National Gallery in London. After that, he seems to have given up painting. In June 1874 Burton obtained a special grant to buy the collection of Alexander Barker, which included Piero della Francesca’s “Nativity” and Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars”. In 1876 the gallery received, by bequest from the haberdasher Wynne Ellis, 94 paintings, mainly by Dutch masters but also works by Pollaiuolo, Dirk Bouts and Canaletto. In the same year an extension designed by the architect Edward Middleton Barry was completed.

Over twenty years Burton was responsible for many purchases: Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, Raphael’s “Ansidei Madonna”, Anthony van Dyck’s “Equestrian Portrait of Charles I”, Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Ambassadors”, and the portrait of Admiral Pulido Pareja, later attributed to Velázquez’s assistant Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo. He also added to the gallery’s collection of early Italian painting. In all, more than 500 works were acquired during his directorship.

In 1884 Burton was knighted, and in 1889 he received the degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Dublin. He died on 16 March 1900 in Kensington, in west London, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.

In 2015 the Irish artist Joe Caslin, in a mural for the marriage equality campaign, referred directly to “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs”. In the autumn of 2017 an exhibition of Burton’s work opened at the National Gallery of Ireland and ran until January 2018.