Comparisons to Monet Bothered This Artist. Now They’re Side by Side. [LIVE]
The French Impressionist painter Claude Monet had something to say about his long-time friend, the British artist and artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. During a tour in the ‘50s, Burne-Jones asked Monet to pose with a painting he had recently completed, titled The Rediscovery of Truth. This painting is very similar to Lady in Red, one of Burne-Jones’ most famous paintings. And on August 20 of this year, The Times of London ran a picture of Lady in Red side by side next to Claude Monet’s The Rediscovery of Truth. The most surprising juxtaposition is the inclusion of a nude woman, standing right in front of The Rediscovery of Truth.
Both paintings are “invented” with “great difficulty,” according to Burne-Jones, but they’re “naturally identical.” To see them side by side is like the way we would compare the Monet and Cézanne paintings at museums around the world. And to see them together is like the way the Monet and Van Gogh paintings are stored at the Louvre in Paris.
But is this a coincidence? Would it be like comparing Monet with Van Gogh or Cézanne with Gauguin? And since there was a great interest in comparing Monet and Cézanne after they died, would it be like comparing Monet and Van Gogh?
The story begins some years before The Rediscovery of Truth:
On March 19, 1916, a letter arrived in Burne-Jones’s post box, written in the English language by a painter named Walter Pach and addressed to the Royal Academy of Arts. It was an invitation to join the Academy’s art world. The letter asked for Burne-Jones’s opinion on Pach’s painting, which was titled On View at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. It depicted two nude men sitting side by side on a stone bench, a “lady” leaning over them. In all, this painting is composed of 40,000 opaque black and
