‘About the Tangle of the Rose’: Thinking with the Fin-de-Siècle Tendril

Abstract

‘[It] transported me a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone’, recalled Robert de la Sizeranne of Edward Burne-Jones's Briar Rose series (1884–90). This essay argues, on the contrary, that the paintings were closer to contemporary concerns than Sizeranne allowed. In Burne-Jones's briar, we find a remarkable example of one of the late nineteenth century's most promiscuous and ambiguous motifs: the tendril. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ornamental motif was at the centre of fin-de-siècle debates about time, capitalist expansion, and imperialism. In visual art, philosophy, and art history, the tendril figured anxieties about where Europe was heading. Tracing its movement through Burne-Jones's canvases into texts by Henri Bergson and Alois Riegl, and decorative art by Victor Horta and William Morris, this essay contends that the tendril traverses a shared, but fragile, trans-European imperial landscape at the end of the nineteenth century.