Artist: Sir Edward Burne Jones (British, 1833-1898)
Title: Christ’s Entry Into Jerusalem, Window in the Church of St. Peter, Vere Street, London
Medium: Antique color print on wove paper after the original satained glass window.
Dimensions: Image Size 4 x 7 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 13 x 16 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
St Peter, Vere Street, known until 1832 as the Oxford Chapel after its founder Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, is a former Anglican church off Oxford Street, London. It has sometimes been referred to as the Marybone Chapel or Marylebone Chapel. The chapel was designed by James Gibbs in 1722. It was originally intended as a Chapel of Ease to supplement the parish church for the growing parish of Marylebone. The building was acquired by the Crown from the Portland Estate in 1817 and was dedicated to St Peter in 1832. In 1830, Parliament had passed an “Act for endowing the Parish Church of Newborough in the County of Northampton, and Three Chapels, called Portland Chapel, Oxford Chapel, and Welbeck Chapel, situate in the Parish of Saint Mary-le-bone, in the County of Middlesex, and also a Chapel erected on Sunk Island in the River Humber”. It was licensed for marriages from 1722 to 1754 and between 1930 and its deconsecration: Margaret Bentinck (daughter of the 2nd Earl, and Duchess of Portland) married here. Incumbents included the theologian F. D. Maurice (1860–69), and William Boyce was the chapel’s organist from 1734 to 1736. Its interior appears in plate 2 of Hogarth’s print series Industry and Idleness. It was also here that the French chef Jassintour Rozea married his French wife Mary Magdalen Bernard in April 1744. They lived on Duke Street close to Grosvenor Square. He became Master Chef to the Duke of Somerset, Charles Seymour, presenting sumptuous banquets for his guests. He wrote several cookery books on gourmet French cooking in the 1750s.
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.