Burne-Jones

Academy Editions London [Published Date: 1979]. Soft cover, [104] pp (unpaginated) . First Edition. Includes 48 full colour single-page plates. Introduction by May Johnson. [Excerpt from Introduction] The ethereal land of day-dreams and reverie, of beauty, love and melancholy is revealed in the art of Edward Burne-Jones. Turning away from the reality of nineteenth-century technology he depicted instead the images of his imagination, and found in the legends and fables of the past and in the works of the Romantic poets matter more congenial to the painter's brush than the everyday world in which he was forced to live. In paintings, tapestries and stained glass Burne-Jones evoked a languid beauty and a dreamy nostalgia for a lost Golden Age of damozels and knights-errant, the heroes and heroines of romance. Thus his work has been identified firstly with Pre-Raphaelitism and then with Aestheticism and Symbolism. The last two movements had in common a tendency to reject materialism and the portrayal of naturalistic scenes in favour of the imagery of the mind, and all shared a strong literary interest especially in poetry and myth. Burne-Jones made an important contribution in both style and subject-matter to all three but remained a distinct and idiosyncratic artistic character who evades categorisation and whose artistic roots lie in his own personal brand of aestheticism.