FOR the Irish public, Burton lives largely by a single picture - The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, one of the relatively few Pre Raphaelite works created by Irish painters, and one of the fewer still which are worth looking at. Its glowing, romantic colour suggests Arthur Hughes or Millais at their best, and in fact Burton had contacts with the group in London (apparently he owned a Rossetti picture which, alas, he was forced to sell).
Victorian (and Georgian), culture was impregnated with German Romanticism, from the generation of Coleridgedown to Meredith at the turn of the century. Like Madise Burton travelled in Germany at a time when the prestige of its artists was extremely high, and he even did an illustration for Goethe's Faust which is shown in the present exhibition. Watercolour was his chosen medium, usually applied opaquely rather than transparently. He varied his subjects a good deal, producing close up nature studies, history pieces, romantic genre and realistic figure studies. And he was no mean hand at portraiture, though his approach is conventional rather than searching.
Two large, and impressive, black and white studies for The Turret Stairs show Burton to have been a solid, well schooled draughtsman with a certain neo classic bias. The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child, which once was so popular in engravings, is a painful piece of period sentimentality, but it caught the mood of the time and he should not be blamed unduly for it. He had a taste for the picturesque and seems to have travelled a good deal, which perhaps accounts for the basic eclecticism of his style. The Venetian Courtesan of 1874, for instance, looks like a conscious attempt to rival the great Venetians on their home ground.
In that same year Burton became director of the National Gallery in London, and stayed in that very demanding post until his retirement 20 years later. He died in 1900, in his mid 80s, and seemingly his official duties had pushed his own creative work increasingly into the background. He carried them out conscientiously, enriching the gallery's collection with a number of masterworks which included Holbein's The Ambassadors and Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks.
Burton was scarcely a major artist, either in terms of output or sheer originality, but he painted a small handful of masterpieces and has his own deserved niche in Irish art. This exhibition, wisely, does not include too much or too many and appears to have been sensitively chosen; it is well worth a visit, and not only by art history students or those with period interests. Though Burton never quite achieved an unmistakable style of his own, he still has enough vitality to keep him interesting.
