GBJ's Bridge of Sighs

Georgiana Macdonald [later Burne=Jones]  The Bridge of Sighs, pen & ink 1859-60; Dennis T 

Lanigan Colln
 https://www.britishartjournal

A second article in the current British Art Journal publishes the Bridge of Sighs drawing by Georgiana Burne-Jones in greater detail than was possible in Pre-Raphaelite Sisters.  

Written by the new owner, Dennis T Lanigan, it describes GBJ’s short-lived artistic career in detail and relates the image to other contemporary depictions of destitution set on or under bridges over the Thames, including Simeon Solomon’s beggar youngsters  complete with white mouse in I am Starving (1857) and two etchings illustrating Hood’s  poem by John Everett Millais and Gerald Fitzgerald (1821-86).  Published at the end of 1858, the last of these is closely comparable in subject matter, showing three watermen with the body of a young woman they have just pulled from the river, observed by a peeler and two inquisitive boys.  GBJ’s version differs compositionally, however.

The article does not include the drawing's provenance, partly given on GBJ's label on the back,which  presents it to her younger grand-daughter, who died in 1975.  This indicates that GBJ kept the work almost until the end of her life.  It was sold at Christie's on 11 December 2018. 
  
Dennis Lanigan concludes his article saying that the work shows the social conscience that would never have  appealed to Georgie’s husband – although he had some radical tendencies in youth – and that it ‘is likely  that she was forced to abandon her vocation against her will because of a lack of support at home and her need to concentrate her activities on being both a wife and mother.  Georgie therefore was almost as much a victim of her circumstances as the unfortunate young woman she portrayed in her drawing.’ 

Simeon Solomon, I am Starving ,  1857, National Gallery of Art Washington