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Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones Bt. A.R.A.
(1833 – 1898)
‘Head Studies of Young Girls’
Signed with initials & dated 1887
Pencil, black chalk & white chalk
Circa 1887
H: 22 in / 56 cm
W: 17½ in / 44½ cm
Stock Number: kt22/sum08
£11,000
This beautiful and sensitive drawing relates to Burne- Jones’ great Briar Rose Series. He worked intermittently on the idea – a variant of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale – for over thirty years of his life, producing effectively three separate series on the theme. Our drawing is a re-working of Burne-Jones second series (now in the Delaware Art Museum), which was to culminate in his final series – that now hanging in Buscot Park. The heads relate to the third of the four pictures, usually referred to as The Council Chamber, where Burne-Jones recalls in his diary entries for 1887 that he “redrew all the figures of the sleeping girls in the third picture of the sleeping palace”.
This is clearly a working drawing for the later oil painting, but it is a work of art in its own right, and one given its author’s important stamp of approval – the signing and dating of it with his initials.Edward Burne-Jones Edward Burne-Jones is without doubt the most important artist in the later phase of England’s Pre- Raphaelite movement and was an artist of enormous influence both at home and abroad.
Educated at Oxford it was there that he met William Morris and that the pair of them came under the influence of Ruskin and Rossetti. Rossetti became a special hero for Burne-Jones and in the late 1850’s and early 1860’s Burne-Jones’ work in watercolour is hard to distinguish from that of the older artist. In the 60’s he became a partner in William Morris’ firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and concentrated a lot of his work into the design of stained glass and many other forms of decorative art. In the 60’s and again in the 1870’s Burne-Jones visited Italy on a number of occasions and it was there that he absorbed first hand the work of the old masters – in particular Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli and Michelangelo. It was in the 1870’s and particularly at the opening exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 that Burne-Jones’ work caught the public imagination. His mature style, a combination of the imaginations of Rossetti and William Morris and the technical execution of the Italian Old Masters, catapulted him to a new status as the star of the Grosvenor Gallery, a key figure in the Aesthetic Movement and one of the leading artists of his day. He showed thereafter with the Grosvenor Gallery and then with its successor the New Gallery and briefly with the Royal Academy, where Lord Leighton had persuaded him to accept the status of A.R.A. The peaks of his later career were King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, which was to be his entrée into international success at the Exposition Universelle and the Briar Rose Series, which he showed at Agnews in 1890. He was created a baronet in 1894.
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