Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones painted a world that never existed and made it convincing enough to shape British visual taste for fifty years. He met William Morris at Oxford, where both were meant to be ordained, and the two of them abandoned the church for art after reading Ruskin and Malory. He had almost no formal training - Rossetti told him to start painting and he did - and his subjects came from Arthurian romance, Greek myth and the Bible, painted in a still, elongated, dreaming manner with a deliberate refusal of the everyday. King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid made him famous in 1884 and was taken up in France, where the Symbolists claimed him. His stained glass and tapestry designs for Morris and Company are as consequential as the paintings: windows in cathedrals and parish churches across Britain and beyond, and the Holy Grail tapestries. He worked with Morris for forty years and illustrated the Kelmscott Chaucer, which is among the most beautiful books ever printed. His long attachment to the sculptor Maria Zambaco caused a public scandal and a suicide attempt on her part in 1869. He was made a baronet, which embarrassed him, and refused most other honours. His son Philip was a painter and his daughter Margaret was Rudyard Kipling s aunt by marriage; Kipling and Stanley Baldwin were both his nephews by his wife Georgiana s family. Georgiana wrote the standard memoir of him. The Kelmscott Chaucer took four years and he made eighty-seven illustrations for it.

• Lived: 1833 CE – 1898 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist