Edward Burne-Jones

Part of the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites, English painter and designer Sir Edward Burne-Jones worked to reflect the ideals of the end of the 19th century. Born in 1833 in Birmingham, Burne-Jones originally intended to pursue a career in the clergy and began a theology degree at Oxford University. There, he met William Morris. The two would form a lifelong friendship, greatly influencing each other’s work and setting up the textiles company Morris & Co., which continues to operate today.

It was also at Oxford that Burne-Jones and Morris worked with the co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the murals of the Oxford Union in the late 1850s. Burne-Jones would go on to define the movement’s direction in the decades that followed, when it became more decorative and took viewers into a medievalist realm of Arthurian knights and auburn-haired maidens.

Like Morris, Burne-Jones sought to re-enchant a world that he felt had been sullied physically by the Industrial Revolution and morally by the unchecked capitalism of the British Empire. He thought that art’s job, far from capturing modern existence, was to offer an escape from it.

Burne-Jones is renowned for his ethereal and romantic style, which often drew upon medieval and mythological themes. Much of Burne-Jones’s work bridged the ideologies of the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements. It is Symbolist in so far as the mise en scène in his paintings revels in ambiguity, without clear explanation of the narrative context or the emotional state of his subjects. At the same time, the lack of specific subject lends an Aesthetic dimension to his pictures.

One of his notable works, Love Among the Ruins (1873), exemplifies his romantic and melancholic vision, lauded by critics as ‘one of the master’s most perfect and beautiful creations’. In 2013 the watercolour sold at Christie’s London for £14,845,875, setting a world auction record for the artist and for a Pre-Raphaelite work.

Burne-Jones served as a bridge between the Brotherhood and the third generation of Pre-Raphaelites, including Thomas Matthews Rooke, Byam Shaw and John William Waterhouse, all of whose work he influenced to a greater or lesser extent.