[81942] Birmingham : BM&AG - The Last Judgement

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham.

The Last Judgement.

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898).

Detail of one of three panels for a stained glass design

Wax crayon, 1874-80.

 

These cartoons for stained glass were executed by Morris & Co for the church of St Michael & St Mary Magdalene, Easthampstead, Berkshire, for the chancel east window. They comprise of three lights crowned by a rose window. The rose window depicted 'Christ in Judgement', the design was done in oil and called 'Dies Domini' (1873-74) it is now lost. There is a pastel version, dated 1875, in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. The cartoons were drawn in 1874, and the window executed in 1876.

 

The triptych cartoon was returned to Burne-Jones's studio, to be coloured in wax crayon in 1880, the colouring bearing little resemblance to the final window.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a painter, illustrator, and designer and a key figure in the second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism. In 1853 he began studying at Oxford University, intending to train for the priesthood, but his interest was turned to art first by William Morris, his fellow student, and then by Rossetti, who remained the decisive influence on him. He left Oxford without taking a degree in 1856 and settled in London.

 

Rossetti gave him a few informal lessons and he attended life drawing classes for a while, but essentially he was self-taught; his taste was more classical than Rossetti's and his elongated forms owed much to the example of Botticelli. He favoured medieval and mythical (especially Arthurian) subjects and hated such modernists as the Impressionists, describing their subjects as ‘landscape and whores’. His own ideas on painting are summed up as follows: ‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream, of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any that ever shone—in a land no-one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms divinely beautiful.’

 

He had a fairly low-key career until 1877, when he became famous overnight with the showing of eight large paintings at the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery. Thereafter he acquired huge fame and prestige, not only in Britain, but also on the Continent: he had considerable influence on the French Symbolists, and the ethereally beautiful women who people his paintings, like the more sensuous types of Rossetti, had many imitators at the end of the century. Although he was lauded for his poetic qualities by many critics, some thought his pictures ‘morbid’ and ‘unmanly’. His paintings tend to be flat and frieze-like in composition, with richly textured surfaces, and his feeling for pattern was put to good use in his work as a designer: he was a founder member of William Morris's decorative arts company in 1861 and designed some outstanding stained glass and tapestries for it, as well as making illustrations for Kelmscott Press books.

 

Burne-Jones's reputation crumbled after his death and did not seriously revive until the 1960s. The best collection of his work is in the City Art Gallery in Birmingham.

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