The Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones was once asked by a young girl if he believed the story he had painted in The Star of Bethlehem. According to his long-suffering wife Georgiana, the daughter of a Methodist minister, he replied: “It’s too beautiful not to be true.”
The Nativity story is represented by a tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi from late in the artist’s life in a glorious new exhibition at Tate Britain – the first in London since 1975, and the first at the Tate since 1933, the centenary of the artist’s birth. There’s also a newly restored triptych, The Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, and a painting in a very medieval style, The Annunciation (the Flower of God), both from earlier in his career. Burne-Jones didn’t paint many religious scenes, but The Morning of the Resurrection, with Mary Magdalene surprised by the risen Christ, is the one most representative of his style.
If you’re into Burne-Jones, be prepared to spend at least two hours luxuriating in his work. Unsurprisingly, the main focus is on his most familiar paintings with classical and mythological themes, featuring the archetypal Burne-Jones female face and figure: slightly distant, dreamy, languid, often androgynous, but above all beautiful. An entire room is devoted to his huge paintings, the stunning King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Golden Stairs, Love Among the Ruins and others displayed in his Exhibition years (from 1877 to his death in 1898) at the Grosvenor Gallery, an alternative to the Royal Academy, which he viewed with contempt.
This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see Burne-Jones’s two great series of paintings, The Briar Rose cycle and the Perseus series, each with a full room devoted to it. The first, based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is exhibited for the first time in a gallery with the additional side panels Burne-Jones painted for the room which is still its home, at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire.
The other series shows scenes from the myth of Perseus, who slays Medusa and rescues Andromeda from a sea monster. Planned as a series of 10 paintings, these were commissioned by the young Arthur Balfour, later to be prime minister, who gave Burne-Jones free rein to produce paintings for his London home. Only three of the series were ever completed in oils, but these are exhibited with seven full-sized preparatory watercolour paintings, telling the whole story.
Burne-Jones was a High Church Anglican in his youth. He was inspired by John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, and flirted with the idea of converting to Catholicism. Training to be a priest at Oxford, he met William Morris, who became his life-long friend. Both switched from theology to art and architecture, and spent their lives bringing beauty to the world.
Edward Burne-Jones is at Tate Britain until February 24
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