Edward Burne-Jones
The Pre-Raphaelite dreamer and friend of Morris.
Edward Burne-Jones met William Morris at Oxford and became his lifelong collaborator, designing stained glass, tapestries and the illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer. His paintings of pale, elongated figures from myth and legend became a model for Symbolism.
Edward Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham in 1833, the son of a frame-maker. His mother died shortly after his birth. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, where he met William Morris. Both intended to become clergymen, but after seeing the Pre-Raphaelites' paintings they decided on art instead. Burne-Jones left Oxford without a degree and became a pupil of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1856.
In 1860 he married Georgiana MacDonald, whose sisters became the mothers of the writer Rudyard Kipling and the prime minister Stanley Baldwin. He became one of the most important collaborators in Morris's firm, producing hundreds of designs for stained glass, tapestries and mosaics. His breakthrough as a painter came in 1877, when he exhibited at the new Grosvenor Gallery in London, including The Beguiling of Merlin, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery.
Among his best-known works are The Golden Stairs of 1880 and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid of 1884, both in Tate Britain. Cophetua won a medal at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris and made him famous in France. The Briar Rose series is at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. He also illustrated the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer with 87 woodcuts.
His style draws on the Italian Renaissance, especially Botticelli and Mantegna, but his figures are pale, elongated and dreamy, and his colours often subdued. He wanted to create a beautiful, timeless world far from industrial England. In the late 1860s he had a much-talked-about love affair with the model and sculptor Maria Zambaco, who influenced several of his pictures. In 1878 he testified in support of Ruskin in the libel case brought against him by Whistler.
Burne-Jones was made a baronet in 1894 and died in 1898. He left the large painting The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon unfinished. His melancholy dreamworld had a great influence on European Symbolism and on later illustration and fantasy art. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds one of the largest collections of his work.