Caricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, Sussex
Burne-Jones produced caricatures throughout his career to entertain friends and family. These also offered an emotional release as visual opposites to the ideal forms that filled the artist's paintings. In the 1860s, when Burne-Jones and William Morris shared rooms at Red Lion Square, the artist often contrasted his own thinness to his friend's rotund figure. The present image is one of many focused on large women and reflects Burne-Jones's concurrent fascination with, and horror at, obesity. He created this drawing to entertain Bertram Brooke, the future Tuan Muda of Sarawak, while the latter was a teenager recooperating from serious illness. The recipient treasured the drawing and later gave it to his wife Gladys. In a memoir of 1929, she identifies the subject as a woman honeymooning at Rottingdean, Sussex (a suberb of Brighton where Burne-Jones had a country house), but specifies it must be "a widow remarried, as there is no indication of virginal contours."
Artwork Details
- Title: Caricature of a windblown woman on the beach at Rottingdean, Sussex
- Artist: Sir Edward Burne-Jones (British, Birmingham 1833–1898 Fulham)
- Date: August 1893
- Medium: Black chalk
- Dimensions: Sheet: 13 9/16 × 9 3/4 in. (34.5 × 24.8 cm)
- Classification: Drawings
- Credit Line: Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, 2020
- Object Number: 2021.16.9
- Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints
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