Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet (28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in England; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria, the church designed by Philip Webb, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge and in Christ Church, Oxford. Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice". In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration, most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer in 1896. His Flower Book, which was published after his death in 1905, is no item of devotional literature in the popular sense. Most of the 38 gouaches in the book take up themes from the Romantic era, the old-fashioned plant-names providing a source of inspiration. Each of the drawings refers in its individual manner to the idea of the circle or the spheres that symbolize the form of the cosmos. These motifs -- and, indeed, all of Burne-Jones' pictures -- serve to reveal to us a romantic dream "of something which as never been and never will be -- in a light more beautiful than has ever shone in a land such as can never be described or conceived, but only longed for." (Edward Burne-Jones) |
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