William Morris and Red House

A number of sources give good summaries of the life of Edward Burne-Jones. See below for:

Victoria Web - Edward Burne-Jones

Wikipedia - Edward Burne-Jones

The present extract is taken, with thanks, from Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelites ( p48-49), 1998, NPG

Rather tall and very thin, though not especially slender...Extremely pale he wa, with the paleness that belongs to fair-haired people, and he looked delicate but not ill. His hair was perfectly straight, and of a colourless kind...From the eyes themselves power simply radiated, and as he talked and listened, if anything moved him, not only his eyes but his whole face seemed lit up from within.

(Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1906)

No portraits of Burne-Jones convey the intensity of his personality and pictorial imagination. Son of a Birmingham picture-framer, he met William Morris at Oxford, studied informally with Rossetti, and was a founder member of Morris and Co, designing much of the firm's stained glass. In 1860 he married Georgiana Macdonald and from 1867 lived at The Grange, Fulham. Embraced by the Establishment later in life he was created a baronet in 1894, to the dismay of many friends.

'One of the nicest young fellows in - Dreamland,' wrote Rossetti in 1856. 'He is doing designs which quite put one to shame, so full are they of everything...He will take the lead in no time.' A year or so later, DGR's teasing limerick was equally apt:

There was a young painter named Jones

Who consisted of nothing but bones;

He painted some pictures, but his friends' various strictures

Caused light to break in upon Jones

Burne-Jones became the leading exponent of Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism in the movement's 'second wave', famous for works like Phyllis and Demophoon, which depicted full frontal nudity and the recognisable features of Maria Zambaco (with whom the artist was romantically entangled from 1866 until 1872). Burnes-Jones's aesthetic creed was famously expressed in his definition:

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 devinely beautiful.

His charactieristic female faces became a by-word for late-Victorian beauty - oval, dreamy, suggestively expressionless, a style perhaps explained by his view that 'The moment you give what people call expression, you destroy the typical character of heads and degrade them into portraits which stand for nothing'.

Given to self-deprecation humour, with a nice talent for caricature, Burne-Jones claimed to hold conservative views. Yet William de Morgan recalled walking one day by the sea, when they saw a man shooting gulls and Burne-Jones turned to his son, 'Never forget when you see a man with a gun, that he's a fool,' he said. And to his wife: 'Teach children to draw animals and they won't wish to shoot them.'

His son Philip Burne-Jones is best known for his 1897 depiction of a female vampire.