Edward Burne-Jones

, 1874, by Frederick Hollyer Born Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphenation of his last names was introduced later) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Welshman, Edward Richard Jones, a frame-maker at Bennetts Hill, where a blue plaque commemorates the painter's childhood. A pub on the site of the house is called the Briar Rose in honour of Burne-Jones' work. His mother Elizabeth Jones (née Coley) died within six days of his birth, and Edward was raised by his father, and the family housekeeper, Ann Sampson, an obsessively affectionate but humourless, and unintellectual local girl. He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school in 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford. At Oxford, he became a friend of William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry. The two Exeter undergraduates, together with a group of Jones' friends from Birmingham known as the Birmingham Set, formed a society, which they called "The Brotherhood". The members of the brotherhood read the works of John Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches, and idealised aspects of the aesthetics and social structure of the Middle Ages. Burne-Jones had intended to become a church minister, but under Rossetti's influence both he and Morris decided to become artists, and Burne-Jones left college before taking a degree to pursue a career in art. In February 1857, Rossetti wrote to William Bell Scott: ==Marriage and family==

In 1856 Burne-Jones became engaged to Georgiana "Georgie" MacDonald (1840–1920), one of the MacDonald sisters. She was training to be a painter, and was the sister of Burne-Jones's old school friend. The couple married on 9 June 1860, after which she made her own work in woodcuts, and became a close friend of George Eliot. (Another MacDonald sister married the artist Sir Edward Poynter, a further sister married the ironmaster Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and yet another sister was the mother of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling and Baldwin were thus Burne-Jones's nephews by marriage). Georgiana gave birth to a son, Philip, in 1861. In the winter of 1864, she became gravely ill with scarlet fever and gave birth to a second son, Christopher, who died soon thereafter. The family then moved to 41 Kensington Square, and their daughter Margaret was born there in 1866. In 1867 Burne-Jones and his family settled at the Grange, an 18th-century house set in a garden in North End, Fulham, London. For the 1870s Burne-Jones did not exhibit, following a number of bitterly hostile attacks in the press, and a passionate affair (described as the "emotional climax of his life") with his Greek model Maria Zambaco, which ended with her trying to commit suicide by throwing herself into Regent's Canal. During these difficult years, Georgiana developed a friendship with Morris, whose wife Jane had fallen in love with Rossetti. Morris and Georgie may have been in love, but if he asked her to leave her husband, she refused. In the end, the Burne-Joneses remained together, as did the Morrises, but Morris and Georgiana were close for the rest of their lives. In 1880, the Burne-Joneses bought Prospect House in Rottingdean, near Brighton in Sussex, as their holiday home and soon after, the next door Aubrey Cottage to create North End House, reflecting the fact that their Fulham home was in North End Road. (Years later, in 1923, Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, and his wife, playwright and novelist Enid Bagnold, added the adjacent Gothic House to the property, which became the inspiration and setting for her play The Chalk Garden ). His troubled son Philip, who became a successful portrait painter, died in 1926. His adored daughter Margaret (died 1953) married John William Mackail (1850–1945), the friend and biographer of Morris, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1911 to 1916. Their children were the novelists Angela Thirkell and Denis Mackail, and the youngest, Clare Mackail. In an edition of the boys' magazine, Chums (No. 227, Vol.  V, 13 January 1897), an article on Burne-Jones stated that "....his pet grandson used to be punished by being sent to stand in a corner with his face to the wall. One day on being sent there, he was delighted to find the wall prettily decorated with fairies, flowers, birds, and bunnies. His indulgent grandfather had utilised his talent to alleviate the tedium of his favourite's period of penance." ==Artistic career==

Early years: Rossetti and Morris '', 1860 Burne-Jones once admitted that after leaving Oxford he "found himself at five-and-twenty what he ought to have been at fifteen". He had had no regular training as a draughtsman and lacked the confidence of science. But his extraordinary faculty of invention as a designer was already ripening; his mind, rich in knowledge of classical story and medieval romance, teemed with pictorial subjects, and he set himself to complete his set of skills by resolute labour, witnessed by his drawings. The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail. Many are pen-and-ink drawings on vellum, exquisitely finished, of which his Waxen Image (1856) is one of the earliest and best examples. Although the subject, medium and manner derive from Rossetti's inspiration, it is not the hand of a pupil merely, but of a potential master. This was recognised by Rossetti himself, who before long avowed that he had nothing more to teach him. Burne-Jones's first sketch in oils dates from this same year, 1856, and during 1857 he made for Bradfield College the first of what was to be an immense series of cartoons for stained glass. In 1858 he decorated a cabinet with the ''Prioress's Tale'' from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, his first direct illustration of the work of a poet whom he especially loved and who inspired him with endless subjects. Thus early, therefore, we see the artist busy in all the various fields in which he was to labour. In 1861, William Morris founded the decorative arts firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb as partners, together with Charles Faulkner and Peter Paul Marshall, the former of whom was a member of the Oxford Brotherhood, and the latter a friend of Brown and Rossetti. Stained glass windows in the Christ Church cathedral and other buildings in Oxford are by Morris & Co. with designs by Burne-Jones. Other windows are in St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, Church of St Editha, Tamworth, Salisbury Cathedral, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Peter and St Paul parish church in Cromer, St Martin's Church in Brampton, Cumbria (the church designed by Philip Webb), St Michael's Church, Brighton, Trinity Church in Frome, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, St Edmund Hall, St Anne's Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands, Kelvinside Hillhead Parish Church, Glasgow and St Edward the Confessor church at Cheddleton Staffordshire. Stanmore Hall was the last major decorating commission executed by Morris & Co. before Morris's death in 1896. It was the most extensive commission undertaken by the firm, and included a series of tapestries based on the story of the Holy Grail for the dining room, with figures by Burne-Jones. In 1891 Jones was elected a member of the Art Workers Guild. Illustration Although known primarily as a painter, Burne-Jones was active as an illustrator, helping the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic to enter mainstream awareness. He designed books for the Kelmscott Press between 1892 and 1898. His illustrations appeared in the following books, among others: • The Fairy Family by Archibald MacLaren (1857) • The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by William Morris (1872) • The Earthly Paradise by William Morris (not completed) • The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer by Geoffrey Chaucer (1896) • Bible Gallery by Dalziel (1881) Design for the theatre In 1894, theatrical manager and actor Henry Irving commissioned Burne-Jones to design sets and costumes for the Lyceum Theatre production of King Arthur by J. Comyns Carr, who was Burne-Jones's patron and the director of the New Gallery as well as a playwright. The play starred Irving as King Arthur and Ellen Terry as Guinevere, and toured America following its London run. Burne-Jones accepted the commission with enthusiasm, but was disappointed with much of the final result. He wrote confidentially to his friend Helen Mary Gaskell (known as May), "The armour is good—they have taken pains with it ... Perceval looked the one romantic thing in it ... I hate the stage, don't tell—but I do." Aesthetics '', 1880 Burne-Jones's paintings were one strand in the evolving tapestry of Aestheticism from the 1860s through the 1880s, which considered that art should be valued as an object of beauty engendering a sensual response, rather than for the story or moral implicit in the subject matter. In many ways, this was antithetical to the ideals of Ruskin and the early Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones's aim in art is best given in his own words, written to a friend: I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in a light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful – and then I wake up, with the waking of Brynhild. His memorial service was held six days later, at Westminster Abbey. His ashes were interred in the churchyard at St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean, a place he knew through summer family holidays. In the winter following his death, a second exhibition of his works was held at the New Gallery, and an exhibition of his drawings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club. ==Honours==

'' (between 1881 and 1898), at Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico In 1881 Burne-Jones received an honorary degree from Oxford, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 1882. but remained unhappy about accepting the honour, which disgusted his socialist friend Morris and was scorned by his equally socialist wife Georgiana. Only his son Philip, who mixed with the set of the Prince of Wales and would inherit the title, truly wanted it. Burne-Jones was made an elected member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 1897. Following Burne-Jones' death, and at the intervention of the Prince of Wales, his memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey. It was the first time an artist had been so honoured. ==Influence==

on Bennetts Hill, Birmingham Burne-Jones exerted a considerable influence on French painting. He was influential among French symbolist painters, from 1889. His work inspired poetry by Algernon Charles Swinburne – Swinburne's 1866 Poems & Ballads is dedicated to Burne-Jones. Three of Burne-Jones's studio assistants, John Melhuish Strudwick, T. M. Rooke and Charles Fairfax Murray, went on to successful painting careers. Murray later became an important collector and respected art dealer. Between 1903 and 1907 he sold a great many works by Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, at far below their market worth. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery now has the largest collection of works by Burne-Jones in the world, including the massive watercolour Star of Bethlehem, commissioned for the Gallery in 1897. The paintings are believed by some to have influenced the young J. R. R. Tolkien, then growing up in Birmingham. Burne-Jones was also a very strong influence on the Birmingham Group of artists, from the 1890s onwards. ==Neglect and rediscovery==

On 16 June 1933, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a nephew of Burne-Jones, officially opened the centenary exhibition featuring Burne-Jones's drawings and paintings at the Tate Gallery in London. In his opening speech at the exhibition, Baldwin expressed what the art of Burne-Jones stood for: But, in fact, long before 1933, Burne-Jones had fallen out of fashion in the art world, much of which soon preferred the major trends in Modern art, and the exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of his birth was a sad affair, poorly attended. It was not until the mid-1970s that his work began to be re-assessed and once again acclaimed, following the publication of Martin Harrison and Bill Waters' 1973 monograph and reappraisal 'Burne-Jones'. In 1975, author Penelope Fitzgerald published a biography of Burne-Jones, her first book. A major exhibit in 1989 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (in book form as: John Christian, The Last Romantics, 1989), traced Burne-Jones's influence on the subsequent generation of artists, and another at Tate Britain in 1997 explored the links between British Aestheticism and Symbolism. ==Gallery==

Stained and painted glass File:Edward Burne-Jones Daniel 1873.jpg|Cartoon for Daniel window, St. Martin's-on-the-Hill, Scarborough, 1873 File:Boston Trinity Church 04.jpg|Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris' Nativity windows, 1882, Trinity Church, Boston File:USA Massachusetts Boston Trinity Nativity-window.jpg|The Worship of the Magi window, 1882, Trinity Church, Boston File:USA Massachusetts Boston Trinity-Nativity-detail-2.jpg|The Worship of the Shepherds window, 1882, Trinity Church, Boston File:Burnejoneswindow.jpg|Nativity scene in St Mary's Church, Huish Episcopi, Somerset File:David Burne-Jones.jpg|David, 1872, in St Michael and All Angels, Waterford, Hertfordshire File:Miriam Burne-Jones.jpg|Miriam, 1872, in St Michael and All Angels, Waterford, Hertfordshire File:E.Burne-Jones Justice St.Andrew&St.Paul.jpg|Justice, Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal File:E.Burne-Jones Miriam St.Giles.jpg|Miriam, 1886, in St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh File:Salvator Mundi Burne-Jones.jpg|Christ as Salvator Mundi, 1896, in St Michael and All Angels, Waterford, Hertfordshire File:St Cecilia narthex.jpg|St. Cecilia window, Second Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois File:Staveley crucifixion.jpg|Crucifixion window in St James's Church, Staveley, Cumbria File:Staveley angel playing harp.JPG|Angel window in St. James's Church, Staveley, Cumbria File:Old West Kirk EBJ Faith.jpg|Faith in the Old West Kirk, Greenock File:Old West Kirk EBJ Music.jpg|Music in the Old West Kirk, Greenock File:Bellringers 003.jpg|St Agnes of Rome and Catherine of Alexandria, St Paul, Irton File:St Germans Priory east window by Edward Burne Jones.jpg|East window, 1896, St Germans Priory, Cornwall File:BJ Troutbeck.jpg|The Ascension, 1898, Jesus Church, Troutbeck, Cumbria Drawings File:Edward Burne-Jones The Knights Farewell.jpg|''The Knight's Farewell'', pen-and-ink on vellum, 1858 File:Edward Burne-Jones Going to the Battle 1858.jpg|Going to the Battle, pen-and-ink with grey wash on vellum, 1858 File:Dalziel Brothers after Edward Burne-Jones King Sigurd 1862.png|King Sigurd, wood-engraving by the Dalziel Bros. after a pen-and-ink drawing, 1862 File:Burne-Jones Ignacy Jan Paderewski.jpg|Portrait of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, 1892 Paintings Early works File:Edward Burne-Jones - The Merciful Knight.jpg|The Merciful Knight, 1863 File:Burne ,Princess Sabra Led to the Dragon.jpg|The Princess Sabra Led to the Dragon, 1866 File:Edward Burne-Jones Maria Zambaco 1870.jpg|Portrait of Maria Zambaco, 1870 File:Edward Burne-Jones Phyllis and Demophoon 1870.jpg|Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870 File:Edward Burne-Jones Temperantia 1872.jpg|Temperantia, 1872 Pygmalion (first series) File:The Heart Desires, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Heart Desires, 1868–1870 File:The Hand Refrains, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones)i.jpg|The Hand Refrains, 1868–1870 File:The Godhead Fires, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Godhead Fires, 1868–1870 File:The Soul Attains, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Soul Attains, 1868–1870 Pygmalion and the Image (second series) File:The Heart Desires, 2nd series, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Heart Desires, 1878 File:The Hand Refrains, 2nd series, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Hand Refrains, 1878 File:The Godhead Fires, 2nd series, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Godhead Fires, 1878 File:The Soul Attains, 2nd series, Pygmalion (Burne-Jones).jpg|The Soul Attains, 1878 The Grosvenor Gallery years File:Edward Burne-Jones Pan and Psyche.jpg|Pan and Psyche, 1874 File:Edward Burne-Jones - An Angel Playing a Flageolet.jpg|An Angel Playing a Flageolet, 1878 File:Edward Burne-Jones The Annunciation.jpg|The Annunciation, 1879 File:Burnejones3.jpg|The Angel, 1881 File:The Mill by Edward Burne-Jones.jpg|The Mill, 1882 File:Edward Burne-Jones - King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid - Google Art Project.jpg|King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884 The Legend of Briar Rose (second series) File:Briar Wood Buscot Park.jpg|The Briar Wood, completed 1890 File:The Council Chamber Buscot Park.jpg|The Council Chamber, 1890 File:The Garden Court Buscot Park.jpg|The Garden Court, 1890 File:The Rose Bower Buscot Park.jpg|The Rose Bower, 1890 Later works File:Burne-Jones, Edward - The Garden of Pan - 1886-1887.jpg|The Garden of Pan, 1886-87, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne File:Edward Burne-Jones - Perseus.jpeg|The Doom Fulfilled, 1888 (Perseus Cycle 7) File:If looks could kill.jpg|The Baleful Head, 1887 (Perseus Cycle 8) File:Edward Burne-Jones Star of Bethlehem.jpg|The Star of Bethlehem, 1890 File:Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones - Vespertina Quies - Google Art Project.jpg|Vespertina Quies, 1893 File:Burne-jones-love-among-the-ruins.jpg|Love Among the Ruins, 1873 File:Burne-Jones Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon v2.jpg|The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon 1881–1898 Decorative arts File:Rubaiyat Morris Burne-Jones Manuscript.jpg|Illuminated manuscript of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by William Morris, illustrated by Burne-Jones with a variant of Love Among the Ruins, 1870s File:Holy Grail Tapestry -The Arming and Departure of the Kniights.jpg|The Arming and Departure of the Knights, one of the Holy Grail tapestries, 1890s, figures by Burne-Jones. File:Kelmscott Troilus.jpg|A page from the Kelmscott Chaucer, decoration by Morris and illustration by Burne-Jones, 1896 Theatre File:Carrcraven7.jpg|Scene from King Arthur, sets by Burne-Jones, 1895 File:Ellen Terry as Guinevere costume by Burne-Jones.jpg|Ellen Terry as Guinevere, costume by Burne-Jones, 1894 Photographs File:Frederick Hollyer Morris and Burne-Jones Families 1874.jpg|The Burne-Jones and Morris families in the garden at the Grange, 1874, photograph by Frederick Hollyer File:Frederick Hollyer portrait of Edward Burne-Jones c1882.jpg|Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1882 (Hollyer) File:Frederick Hollyer portrait of Georgiana Burne-Jones c1882.jpg|Georgiana Burne-Jones, c. 1882 (Hollyer) File:Frederick Hollyer Garden Studio at the Grange 1887.jpg|Burne-Jones's garden studio at the Grange, 1887 (Hollyer) ==See also==