Inspired by ‘stunners’, honoured by posterity

DESCRIBED as “the first major biography in 35 years of the greatest British artist of the late 19th century” this handsome volume is far more than that, and provides a wide-ranging introduction not only to late 19th century art in Britain but also to key figures in the Arts and Crafts movement such as William Morris.

The book runs to 625 pages of well researched and clear, lucid, well-written prose. There are detailed descriptions of Burne-Jones’s friends, his journeys to Italy, his marriage and family life; and above all his art — the hundreds of stained glass windows he designed, and his many lustrous oil paintings replete with beautiful but vacant-eyed ‘stunners’ — the beautiful women who were to serve as muses, and models, for the artist throughout his career. Burne-Jones’s canvases, inspired by artists of the Renaissance such as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, epitomise much of the greatness — and oddness — of Victorian England. MacCarthy recounts the artist’s childhood in Birmingham where he was born in 1833. His mother having died in childbirth, Burne-Jones grew up with his father, who struggled to make a success of a framing shop. Illness and adversity left both father and son equally unable to cope with the world. Burne-Jones reacted by burying himself in books, demonstrating a precocious talent at sketching portraits from an early age. He developed a dependence on women, and a fixation on an ideal of female beauty, that would last his entire life.

“Passionate Brompton”, or “PB”, the shorthand used to describe Burne-Jones and the other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle into which he was a late entry, described those poets, musicians and painters who spent their lives in pursuit of aesthetic beauty. It was an movement that was simultaneously derided and admired. However in 1875, when a department store named Liberty’s opened on Regent Street, selling Indian silk fabrics and Arts and Crafts furnishings, it was an instant success, showing that what had started out as a small art movement, was rapidly becoming a popular social phenomenon. Burne-Jones was satirised in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience, as epitomising the “greenery-yallery Grosvenor Gallery foot-in-the-grave young man” of the Aesthetic Movement. The young Oscar Wilde, satirised in the play, created a stir at the Grosvenor Gallery, when he arrived at the inaugural exhibition in May 1877 wearing a coat he had designed, in the form of a cello.