SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES BT ARA (1833-1898)

Burne-Jones is the most important artist in the second generation of Pre-Raphaelitism. His early works were influenced by Rossetti but in the mid 1860s his own distinctive style developed. This style reveals his admiration for the early Renaissance but is never merely derivative or decorative. His paintings always embody an emotional charge and often conceal private autobiographical meanings.

Burne-Jones was the son of a Birmingham framemaker and went up to Exeter college in Oxford in 1853 where he met his life-long friend William Morris. He had always been an enthusiastic amateur artist: at Oxford he read Ruskin and decided against his intention to enter the church, but to become a painter. Ruskin's writings and the collection of Thomas Combe in Oxford gave him an enthusiasm for the Pre-Raphaelites. At the beginning of 1856 he met Rossetti who encouraged him to move to London, gave him informal lessons and initiated his career. In 1857 he joined Rossetti painting murals in the Oxford Union building. He married in 1860 and in 1861 he was a founder member of Morris & Company. His early work was influenced by Rossetti's medievalism and at that time he produced very detailed finished pen and ink drawings and small intense watercolours.

His style changed in the 1860s. He continued to paint subjects from medieval legends and fairy tales although a project to illustrate William Morris's ”Earthly Paradise• in the late 1860s gave him a new interest in classical mythology. Visits to Italy in 1859 and 1862 deepened his knowledge of Renaissance art. The second was made with Ruskin, who encouraged him to copy from Tintoretto in Venice. In addition the stained glass cartoons, which he began to design for Morris & Company and which he produced until the end of his life, made him more confident of working on a large scale and sharpened his sense of decorative design. In 1864 he became an Associate of the Old Watercolour Society, and began to exhibit publicly.

Although his works received hostile criticism in the press he gained the first of many followers among young painters, such as Walter Crane, who exhibited at the Dudley Gallery. Burne-Jones resigned from the Old Watercolour Society in 1870, in a controversy ostensibly over the nudity of ”Phyllis and Demophoon (Birmingham Art Gallery). However, these complaints probably concealed disquiet about the painting's latent references to Burne-Jones's stormy affair with Marie Zambaco who modelled for Phyllis.
For the next few years Burne-Jones worked in isolation. His affair finally ended in about 1874 but his relationship with his wife had become understandably strained. He afterwards called this period 'the desolate years'. He showed only a few pictures at the Dudley Gallery and was financially supported by his work for Morris & Company and by his patrons and friends William Graham and F.R. Leyland. Yet in these years his painting matured. He visited Italy again in 1871 and 1873 and studied the work of Botticelli, Mantegna and Michelangelo. He also began to paint in oils on a large scale. When he showed eight pictures in the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 he became famous overnight and was seen as the leader of the Aesthetic Movement. He continued to exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery and from 1888 at the New Gallery. Although he reluctantly accepted an Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1885, he exhibited there only once in 1886 and resigned in 1893.

In 1890 his four ”Briar Rose” paintings (Buscot Park) were shown at Agnews Gallery and in the winter of 1892-3 an exhibition of his collected works took place at the New Gallery. These exhibitions were very successful but later in the decade he found it harder to sell his major paintings as public taste changed and his art, meanwhile, took on an increasingly stylised and Byzantine quality. In this period he produced a number of attractive small works and finished drawings. He was made an honorary DCL at Oxford in 1881 and accepted a Baronetcy in 1894. An extensive memorial exhibition was held at the New Gallery in 1898-9 and a major Arts Council exhibition of his work was held in 1975.