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Artist or Maker: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., A.R.A., R.W.S. (1833-1898)

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Provenance: Mrs S. Ralli by 1899.

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Exhibited: London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Drawings and Studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bart, 1899, no. 175.

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Literature: Timotheos Catsiyannis, Pandias Stephen Rallis, London, 1986, p. 30, illustrated.

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Notes: This superb portrait drawing is not mentioned in Burne-Jones's own work-record, Lady Burne-Jones's Memorials, or the early monographs of Bell and De Lisle. It did, however, appear in the memorial exhibition of the artist's drawings held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1899.

The sitter was Catherine Zanni Mavrocordatou, who married Antonio Theodorou Ralli and is recorded as bearing her second child, Marietta, in Trieste in 1838. This would imply that she was born about 1815/20 and was in her seventies when the drawing was made in 1892. Marietta, who is said to have received 'the finest school education' and been 'renowned for her kindness and delicacy of manners', married Stephen Ralli in London in 1855, and was presumably the Mrs Stephen Ralli who lent the drawing to the BFAC exhibition in 1899, by which time her mother may have been dead. Mother and daughter have sometimes been confused. A recent book on the Ralli family reproduces the drawing as a likeness of Marietta in her old age.

The Rallis originated in Chios, the Greek island just off the Turkish mainland. They were an enterprising clan, and in the early 19th Century established themselves as traders and financiers far beyond the Aegean. Pandias Ralli was the dominant personality, setting up a business in London which was central to the whole enterprise. Meanwhile his four brothers created a network of trading contacts, John settling in Odessa, Thomas in Constantinople, Augustus in Marseilles and Eusratius, the youngest, in Liverpool. Augustus (1797-1878) was the father of the Stephen Ralli who became the son-in-law of our sitter.

Burne-Jones seems to have had several contacts with the Ralli family; another member, Pandeli Ralli, lent three drawings to the B.F.A.C. exhibition. These contacts, moreover, were only part of a much wider association with the group of wealthy merchant and banking families, linked by marriage and commerical interests, who set the pace in London's Anglo-Greek community. Constantine Ionides, who bequeathed his collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1901, and his siblings Alexander, Luke and Aglaia, were all either patrons of Burne-Jones or his intimates. With their cousin, the dazzling Maria Zambaco, he conducted a tempestuous affair, while their friend Maria Spartali, another beauty as well as a talented artist, was among his models. The Rallis may not have been so central to his life but they were certainly in touch with those who were. Both the Rallis and the Ionides had their London offices in Finsbury Circus. Alexander Ionides, the father of Constantine and his siblings, had succeeded Pandias Ralli as Greek Consul-General in 1853, and in the 1880s both families seem to have been involved with the building of St Sophia, the Greek Orthodox church in Moscow Road, Paddington, which Burne-Jones had hopes of decorating. Another significant figure in this context is Burne-Jones's old friend and mentor G.F. Watts. Watts had been painting portraits of the Ionides since the 1830s, eventually immortalising no fewer than five generations, but Rallis and other Anglo-Greeks were also among his sitters. In carrying out commissions for both Ionides and Rallis, Burne-Jones was following this pattern.

Burne-Jones's popularity in the 1880s led to many requests for portraits. It was not an art form that came easily to him. He had the highest standards, claiming that portraiture should be 'the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, accidental'. There was also the problem of reconciling the demands of likeness with his own very clearly perceived aesthetic ideal. 'I do not easily get portraiture', he wrote, 'and the perpetual hunt to find in a face what I like, and leave out what mislikes me, is a bad school for it'. It is not surprising that he was often most successful when painting his own family and friends, or those who conformed to his particular vision, namely children and young girls.

But Burne-Jones was good with older sitters too. True, old age plays very little part in his never-never dream world, in which everyone seems to enjoy eternal youth, but the elderly did provide him with a golden opportunity to reveal 'character and moral quality.' One such sitter who inspired him was Canon David Melville, the father of this last Egeria, May Gaskell, whose relationship with the artist is the subject of a recent book by her great-grand-daughter, Josceline Dimbleby. But the drawing of Catherine Ralli is his masterpiece in this genre. A subtle and penetrating piece of characterisation, capturing beautifully the shrewdness and wisdom embodied in the old woman's features, it is also an astonishing piece of draughtsmanship, the handling of the lace cap alone being a tour de force. The Polish pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski, who sat to Burne-Jones in 1890 for a well-known portrait drawing, recalled him working on it 'very rapidly, even violently'. The phrase is unexpected, given the delicate handling of the drawing in question. However, it suggests the commitment and passion that Burne-Jones brought to this area of his creative activity, and we sense this again in the likeness of Catherine Ralli drawn two years later.

If the head itself is remarkable enough, the portrait is given a dramatic new dimension by the predella panel beneath. Its subject clearly suggested by the sitter's name, it introduces an element of symbolism which we only find so overtly deployed in one other portrait by Burne-Jones, his allegorical likeness of his mistress Maria Zambaco, dating from 1870 (Clemen-Sels-Museum, Neuss; illustrated in Christopher Wood, Burne-Jones, London, 1998, p. 51). It would be interesting to know who suggested the concept. Does it reflect the piety of the sitter, or is it simply a transcendental reference typical of Burne-Jones? Perhaps both, the former inspiring the latter.

According to the Golden Legend, St Catherine of Alexandria was a woman of royal birth and great erudition who was converted to Christianity and experienced a vision in which she underwent a mystic marriage with Christ. As Burne-Jones would have known, the subject was often treated by the old masters. Indeed he himself had already attempted it in the predella of the central light of the St Catherine window made by William Morris for the Regimental Chapel at Christ Church, Oxford, in the late 1870s. The shape of the panel required for the portrait necessitated a different composition, but both versions show the Saint being presented to Christ by the Virgin Mary in a rocky landscape. (For the design of the Christ Church version, see the cartoon illustrated in the catalogue of the Lloyd Webber Collection when this was exhibited at the Royal Academy last year, p. 94). The three angels on the left in the drawing, brought in to help fill up the narrow 'landscape' format, echo a similar group that appears in a large decorative painting representing the Nativity that Burne-Jones and his assistants had executed for St John's Church, Torquay, 1888. The instruments of the Passion held by the angels in the Torquay painting are replaced in the drawing by symbols of St Catherine's martyrdom.

The drawing was photographed by Frederick Hollyer, the Kensington photographer whose reproductions of Burne-Jones's drawings are so authentic in appearance that they are often taken for originals. It is unlikely that the image had the popular appeal that attached to Hollyer's photographs of the artist's more idealist head studies or the portrait of the charismatic Paderewski, but a photograph may well have been commissioned by the Rallis so that members of the family could have copies.

We are grateful to Julia Ionides for her help in preparing this catalogue entry.

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