30 Facts About Edward Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter.

Edward Burne-Jones worked as a designer of a wide range of crafts including ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and mosaics.

Edward Burne-Jones's designs are still to be found in churches across the UK, with examples in the US and Australia.

Edward Burne-Jones attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school in 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford.

Edward Burne-Jones had intended to become a church minister, but under Rossetti's influence both he and Morris decided to become artists, and Edward Burne-Jones left college before taking a degree to pursue a career in art.

In 1856 Edward Burne-Jones became engaged to Georgiana "Georgie" MacDonald, one of the MacDonald sisters.

Edward Burne-Jones was training to be a painter, and was the sister of Burne-Jones's old school friend.

Edward Burne-Jones's adored daughter Margaret married John William Mackail, the friend and biographer of Morris, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1911 to 1916.

Edward Burne-Jones once admitted that after leaving Oxford he "found himself at five-and-twenty what he ought to have been at fifteen".

Edward Burne-Jones had had no regular training as a draughtsman and lacked the confidence of science.

Edward Burne-Jones saw Florence, Pisa, Siena, Venice and other places, and appears to have found the gentle and romantic Sienese more attractive than any other school.

In 1870, Edward Burne-Jones resigned his membership following a controversy over his painting Phyllis and Demophoon.

Edward Burne-Jones was asked to make a slight alteration, but instead "withdrew not only the picture from the walls, but himself from the Society".

Edward Burne-Jones now began pictures in oils, working at them in turn, and having them on hand.

Edward Burne-Jones followed up the signal success of these pictures with Laus Veneris, the Chant d'Amour, Pan and Psyche, and other works, exhibited in 1878.

Edward Burne-Jones next turned to two important sets of pictures, The Briar Rose and The Story of Perseus, although these were not completed.

Edward Burne-Jones designed books for the Kelmscott Press between 1892 and 1898.

Edward Burne-Jones's illustrations appeared in the following books, among others:.

Edward Burne-Jones accepted the commission with enthusiasm, but was disappointed with much of the final result.

Edward Burne-Jones's paintings were one strand in the evolving tapestry of Aestheticism from the 1860s through the 1880s, which considered that art should be valued as an object of beauty engendering a sensual response, rather than for the story or moral implicit in the subject matter.

Edward Burne-Jones was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1885, and the following year he exhibited uniquely at the Academy, showing The Depths of the Sea, a painting of a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love.

William Morris died in 1896, and the health of Edward Burne-Jones declined substantially after.

Edward Burne-Jones's ashes were interred in the churchyard at St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean, a place he knew through summer family holidays.

In 1881 Edward Burne-Jones received an honorary degree from Oxford, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 1882.

Edward Burne-Jones was formally created a baronet of Rottingdean, in the county of Sussex, and of the Grange, in the parish of Fulham, in the county of London, in the baronetage of the United Kingdom on 3 May 1894, but remained unhappy about accepting the honour, which disgusted his socialist friend Morris and was scorned by his equally socialist wife Georgiana.

Edward Burne-Jones was made an elected member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium in 1897.

Edward Burne-Jones was influential among French symbolist painters, from 1889.

Edward Burne-Jones was a very strong influence on the Birmingham Group of artists, from the 1890s onwards.

On 16 June 1933, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a nephew of Edward Burne-Jones, officially opened the centenary exhibition featuring Edward Burne-Jones's drawings and paintings at the Tate Gallery in London.

But, in fact, long before 1933, Edward Burne-Jones had fallen out of fashion in the art world, much of which soon preferred the major trends in Modern art, and the exhibit marking the 100th anniversary of his birth was a sad affair, poorly attended.