William Burges - Personal Life

Personal Life

Burges, who never married, was considered by his contemporaries to be eccentric, unpredictable, over-indulgent and flamboyant. He was also physically unprepossessing, described by the wife of his greatest patron as "ugly Burges." Short, fat, and so near-sighted that he once mistook a peacock for a man, Burges appears to have been sensitive about his appearance and very few images of him exist. The known portraits are: a painting of 1858 by Edward John Poynter on a panel of the Yatman Cabinet; a photograph from the 1860s, by an unknown author, showing Burges dressed as a court jester; a sketch of 1871 in The Graphic by Theodore Blake Wirgman; a pencil drawing in profile of 1875 by Edward William Godwin; three posed photographs from 1881 by Henry Van der Weyde and a posthumous caricature by Edward Burne-Jones.

Whatever his physical shortcomings, his personality, his conversation and his sense of humour were attractive and infectious, Crook commenting that "his range of friends the whole gamut of pre-Raphaelite London." Burges's childlike nature occasioned comment; Dante Gabriel Rossetti composing a limerick about him (see box).

"There's a babyish party called Burges,
Who from childhood hardly emerges.
If you hadn't been told,
He's disgracefully old,
You would offer a bull's-eye to Burges."

Robert Kerr's novel of 1879, The Ambassador Extraordinary, involves an architect Georgius Oldhousen, whom Crook considers to be based on Burges; he is "not exactly young in years but is in an odd way youthful in appearance and in manners Georgius can never grow old... His strong point is a disdain for Common Sense... His vocation is Art... matter of Uncommon Sense." Burges was a clubbable man. Elected to the Institute of British Architects in 1860, in 1862 he was appointed to its Council and in 1863 was elected to the Foreign Architectural Book Society, the FABS, which comprised the RIBA elite and was limited to fifteen members. He became a member of the Athenaeum Club in 1874, was a member of the Arts Club, the Medieval Society, the Hogarth Club, and was elected to the Royal Academy in the year of his death.

Burges was a fanatical collector, particularly of drawings and metalwork. He was also a Freemason. Other pursuits included ratting and opium. The influence of drugs on his life and his architectural output has been debated; Crook speculating that it was in Constantinople, on his tour in the 1850s, that he first tasted opium and the Dictionary of Scottish Architects stating with certainty that his early death was brought about "at least partly as a result of his bachelor lifestyle of smoking both tobacco and opium." The architectural writer Simon Jenkins speculated as to why Sir John Heathcoat-Amory chose as his architect "an opium-addicted bachelor Gothicist who dressed in medieval costume." Burges's own diary of 1865 includes the reference, "Too much opium, did not go to Hayward's wedding", and Crook concludes that "it is hard to resist the conclusion that reinforced the dreamier elements in his artistic make-up".