Edward Burne-Jones
Nationality: British
Born: 1833-08-28, Birmingham, England
Died: 1898-06-17

Edward Coley Burne as he was christened, the only son of Edward Richard Jones and his wife Elizabeth Coley, was born at Birmingham, August 28, 1833. He was sent in 1844 to King Edward's School in the same city, where he studied to so good purpose, that in 1852 he won an exhibition which enabled him to enter Exeter College, Oxford, to which he went the same year, his father's wish and his own intention being that he should eventually be ordained as a minister of the Church of England. The pictorial work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, however, with which he became acquainted first through an illustration to William Alhingham's 'Elfin Mere,' and later at the house of Mr. Combe, the director of the Clarendon Press, so aroused his enthusiasm that he resolved finally to abandon his proposed career and devote himself to art. In 1855 he went to London and made the acquaintance of Rossetti, on whose recommendation he left the University without taking his degree, and, after a brief period of study in that artist's studio, began in 1856 the serious work of his life without further instruction, though for a long time under the frequent superintendence and with the constant advice of his only master. He settled to begin with at 17, Red Lion Square, where his earliest works, mostly in pen and ink and watercolours, were carried out.

In September 1859 he paid a visit to Italy and studied the works of the Italian masters at Florence, Siena, Pisa and elsewhere. On returning to London he removed to Russell Place, Fitzroy Square, and on June 9, 1860, was married to Miss Georgiana Macdonald in Manchester Cathedral. He retired from the Water Colour Society in 1870, in consequence of a misunderstanding, and thenceforward, with the exception of a solitary reappearance with two pictures at the Dudley Gallery in 1873, was unknown as an exhibitor, and, to a large section of the public, even as an artist, until the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, which, containing an important representation of his completed work, brought him once for all into popular notice, if not at once into popular estimation, in his native land at least, for the French critics to whose attention his work was introduced for the first time at the Exposition of 1878 received it at once with unqualified approval.

He was not a great painter in the true sense of the word. He never attained to that absolute mastery of the materials of his craft, that positively riotous ease of workmanship that belonged to such painters as Rembrandt and Velasquez, but among great artists he takes his place undisputed in the very front rank. His earlier work suffered technically from the delayed commencement and peculiar nature of his art education, and even in his matured years, though he attained a marvelous accuracy and exquisiteness of touch in drawing, he never reached real breadth or strength of style; but from the first he possessed an infallible sense of beauty of form and colour, a powerful and overwhelming originality, and an unequaled grace and delicacy of fancy.

Source: Exerted from Williamson, George C. "Burne-Jones, Edward," Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Vol.1. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1925.