Artist: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (British, 1833-1898)
Title: Venus’ Looking Glass
Medium: Antique Heliogravure on wove paper after the original oil on canvas by master engraver Dujardin.
Dimensions: Image Size 6 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 16 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
Burne-Jones painted this subject for Grosvenor Gallery’s first exhibition, in 1877 (Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), and his composition encapsulates the emerging Aesthetic style. Specific narrative is avoided, and the sweetly elegant girls—whose faces and forms pay tribute to Sandro Botticelli—convey a mood of dreamy melancholy. Gathered before a strange barren landscape, the maidens are entranced by a reflective pool—the mirror of the title—and in a lovely visual conceit, the flowered lawn in the foreground crowns their reflected heads.
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet ARA was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in Britain; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Martin’s Church in Brampton, Cumbria (the church designed by Philip Webb), St Michael’s Church, Brighton, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, Christ Church, Oxford and in St. Anne’s Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands. Burne-Jones’s early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic “voice”. In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration, most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press’s Chaucer in 1896.