The Mill

Edward Burne-Jones painted a world that had never existed and did it with total conviction. Knights, sleeping courts, stairways, damsels, all rendered in a cool pale palette that owes more to early Italian painting than to anything Victorian. He met William Morris at Oxford, abandoned plans for the church, and the two remained close collaborators for life. Stained glass, tapestry and book design occupied as much of his time as painting, and the Kelmscott Chaucer, illustrated by him, is one of the great printed books of the century. Ruskin and Rossetti shaped his direction early. The later work grew larger and more static, figures caught in a kind of suspended animation that some find hypnotic and others find inert. The Briar Rose series, with its sleeping figures overgrown by thorns, is the clearest statement of what he was after.