Edward Burne-Jones: 12 works

'Like many artists Burne-Jones worked first on nudes before clothing the figures. His skill in foreshortening to suggest depth and in showing contorted poses came from his study of Italian Renaissance art, and is well demonstrated here.'

'This decorative watercolour was painted for the artist's friend and patron, Mrs Euphrosyne Cassavetti, and it displays Edward Burne-Jones's enthusiasm for the art of Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.'

'Burne-Jones was active as a designer for Morris and Company, and in fact created a set of tiles and a tapestry in which the same subject is featured.'

'This painting is an example of Edward Burne-Jones's interest in investigating a mood rather than telling a story. He deliberately made his pictures enigmatic and the meaning of this painting has provoked much debate.'

'"My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us in turn, then it crushes us," was Burne-Jones' heartfelt or disillusioned comment. The work is a perfect example of his taste for classical myths and medieval legends, which mingle uneasy sensuality and a feeling of disquiet, which make his symbolism particularly bitter.'

'Edward Burne Jones was partly inspired by Alfred Tennyson's poem The Beggar Maid. He also believed in the transforming power of the act of looking and thought of the eyes as windows of the soul.'

'Writing in 1904, his widow, Georgiana Burne-Jones, described how the painting had its origins in one such scheme: '(it) is a fulfilment of part of Edward's intention to paint the Beginning of the World. He first called it "The Youth of Pan" ' (G. Bume-Jones, Memorials of Edward, Burne-Jones (1904), vol. II, London, 1993, p. 174).'

'These had greatly impressed Burne-Jones on his second visit to Italy with John Ruskin, in 1862.'

'The slender, vertical format of this painting recalls the fact that many of Burne-Jones's designs were successfully translated into stained-glass windows and textiles. Burne-Jones painted this work for Mrs. Whitin, of Whitinsville, Massachusetts.'

'Initial charcoal sketches set this scene by the sea, but after visiting Tuscany in 1870, Edward Burne-Jones placed the gigantic Car of Love in the winding lanes of Siena.'

'The dragon is derived from a sixteenth-century German woodcut that Burne-Jones had probably copied in the Department of Prints and Drawings in The British Museum.'

'This composition was the first that Burne-Jones had designed specifically for a tapestry. Previously, pieces woven from his designs by the weavers in the workshops set up by Morris in 1881 at Merton Abbey were adapted from preliminary sketches for stained glass.'