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School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk

Display artist/maker:

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones

Born: 1833, UK, England, Birmingham, Bennetts Hill Died: 1898, Rottingdean

Painter, illustrator and designer. A pupil of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and protégé of John Ruskin, he became a leading member of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He initially studied for the priesthood at Oxford, 1853, where he met William Morris and they both decided to become artists. Apprenticing himself to Rossetti in 1856, the largely self-taught Burne Jones increasingly developed his own style. In 1860 he married fellow artist Georgiana MacDonald (1840–1920) and used her as his model for many years. They had two children. Burne-Jones produced stained glass designs for James Powell & Sons and others before he joined Morris’s new venture, ‘The Firm,’ in 1861, becoming Principle Designer in textiles, illustrations, ceramics and stained glass. He continued to produce material for Morris thereafter. Throughout this time he developed his mastery in painting, moving from watercolour to oil (tempera). His exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, London in 1877 brought overnight success. Subsequently his work, alternating between brilliant colour and more sombre tone, took on a monumental scale, and he produced a large body of work. Critics attacked the lack of realism in his subject matter but he was unmoved, seeing art as the objectification of sensuality. In this he was a major proponent of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s to 1880s. He accepted a baronetcy in 1894, changing his name to Burne-Jones.