Edward Burne-Jones

1833 - 1898 • English• Painter • Pre-Raphaelite/Symbolist

"The look of the pictures has done me good: I feel that I could paint so much better already." - Edward Burne-Jones

Burne-Jones met his lifelong friend and collaborator, William MORRIS, at Exeter College of Oxford University in 1853. Both were inspired by reading RUSKIN. ROSSETTI gave Burne-Jones a few lessons, but his art was otherwise self-taught. Burne-Jones supplied Morris with designs for STAINED GLASS, tiles, and TAPESTRY. In 1862 he went to Paris and Italy with Ruskin, who had him copy GIOTTO and Venetian painters like TITIAN and TINTORETTO, artists whose qualities of "grace," "tranquillity," and "repose" Ruskin valued. After Burne-Jones went on to VENICE without Ruskin, he described his reactions to what he saw in the letter to Ruskin quoted from above. Eight pictures of his in the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1877 brought Burne-Jones sudden fame and moved him to the forefront of AESTHETICISM. (Known as a shrine of artiness, the Grosvenor was lampooned in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, 1881.) The women Burne-Jones painted were beautiful and chaste, sensual and remote, dreamy and languorous, and the subjects in which they appeared were taken from MEDIEVAL legend or CLASSICAL mythology, although he also painted biblical and fanciful themes. (Chaste though the women may have been, his paintings of women proved irresistible to some men who bought them and could not refrain from planting kisses on the canvas.) Among "fanciful themes" is The Golden Stairs (1876-80). A procession of 17 women (all based on a single model) descends a spiral staircase "like spirits in an enchanted dream, each moving gracefully, freely, and in unison with her neighbors," as a contemporary reviewer wrote. "What is the place they have left, why they pass before us thus, whither they go, who they are, there is nothing to tell." Burne-Jones received letters from around the world asking for an explanation. His ambiguity was intentional, linking him to the SYMBOLIST movement, and to Stephane Mallarme's later (1891) pronouncement: "To name an object is to take away three-fourths of the pleasure given by a poem. This pleasure consists in guessing little by little: to suggest it, that is the ideal." The descent of Burne -Jones's reputation was swift, however. In his 1927 book Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting, BELL reproduced The Golden Stairs, citing it as the epitome of PreRaphaelitism, a movement of "utter insignificance in the history of European culture."