Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/410

Burton , where the extent and accuracy of his information made themselves felt in all the discussions in which he took part.

It was a surprise to the outside world when, in 1874, Burton was appointed director of the National Gallery in London in succession to his friend. Sir William Boxall [q. v.] But it was no surprise to the friends who knew how thoroughly the studies of many years had fitted him for the office. The choice was a fortunate one for the nation. Invested with almost autocratic power in the expenditure of the liberal sum which for many years was voted for the purchase of additions to the national collection, he used it with a discretion founded upon sound knowledge, and governed by a resolution to add to the gallery only the best works that came into the market. During the twenty years he acted as director, no fewer than some 450 foreign, and some hundred English, pictures were added to the collection, chiefly by purchase. The foreign pictures were classified under his direction according to the different schools, making comparatively easy the study of the progressive development of the painter’s art in Europe from its infancy onwards. All his thoughts and all his time were devoted to the care and development of the gallery. It was a duty to which he sacrificed without a murmur his personal ambition as an artist. From the time of his appointment he laid aside his easel, and did not even finish work that he had begun and well advanced, or turn to account the great store of studies which he had made for pictures that would have added much to his reputation. By this renunciation art lost much, but the country gained by it in the formation and arrangement of a collection which for general excellence is unsurpassed, and by reason of its excellence has induced the possessors of paintings of the highest class to present them as gifts to fill up gaps in the collection, and still further to augment its reputation. Another service of the greatest value he also performed in the public interest by a work into which he poured the results of the study and observation of years: this was a catalogue raisonné of the pictures by foreign artists, with elaborate biographical and critical notices, furnishing in a compendious form the information which could not otherwise be gained by a student except at the cost of infinite labour and expense. Unfortunately this catalogue was issued in an uncouth and unwieldy form, which robs it of its attractiveness and half its utility. The volume, Sir Walter Armstrong writes, ‘contains nearly three hundred memoirs of the painters whose works are represented on the walls, and the analysis given of character in each individual instance is as remarkable for concentrated power as is the reverential tribute paid by him to all the greatest elements in their genius. In such writing as his notes on Rembrandt and Leonardo and Correggio, we feel that these passages alone would suffice as witness to the deep penetrative power of his mind, the large sympathy of his nature with the great old masters.’

Burton was knighted in 1884. On his retirement in 1894 from the directorship of the National Gallery, despite the leisure now at his command he did not resume painting nor touch again any of the studies which had for more than twenty years rested in his portfolios. Probably the increased weakness of his eyesight and the long disuse of his brush may have filled him with misgivings, and with a resolve not to hazard the production of anything below the level of the drawings of his youth and middle age. He did not even finish what a little more labour would have made one of his finest works, ‘A Venetian Lady seated at a Balcony,’ from which the linen sheet, thrown by him over it more than twenty-five years before, was removed only after his death. In 1896 he was gratified by having conferred upon him the degree of LL.D. of Trinity College, Dublin. Though so long absent from Ireland, his heart was there to the last. Always reserved and reticent in the extreme to strangers, he enjoyed his favourite studies and the pleasures of a limited social circle in which he was held in high esteem, till his health began to fail in 1899. He died unmarried at his house, 43 Argyll Road, Kensington, on 16 March 1900, and was buried on the 22nd in the Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin, where both his parents already rested.

There is a portrait of Burton by Wells, which is received as a good likeness of him in middle age. There are also several good photographs of him.

 BURTON, ISABEL, (1831–1896), wife of Sir Richard Francis Burton [q. v.], came of an old catholic family. Her father was Henry Raymond Arundell, a lineal descendant of the sixth Baron Arundell of Wardour. She was thus able to claim, while living at Trieste, the rank of Gräfin, in virtue of her descent from the first Baron Arundell of Wardour, who had been created an