Artist: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (British, 1833-1898)
Title: Courtesy and Frankness (Courtesie and Fraunchise) (from Spenser’s, Mask of Cupid)
Medium: Antique heliogravure on wove paper after the original drawing by a Master Engraver.
Dimensions: Image Size 7 x 7 5/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 16 x 17 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
Courtesy and Frankness in the Garden of Idleness from The Mask of Cupid by Edmund Spencer.
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.