SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES

Until Edward Burne-Jones was twenty-three years old he never saw a good picture. It was in that year that he began to study the rudiments of drawing. Yet a year or two later no less an artist and critic than Dante Gabriel Rossetti declared that Burne-Jones' designs were equal to Albrecht Dürer's finest work; and today he is regarded as "perhaps the most perfect of English painters."

As his name indicates, Burne-Jones was of Welsh descent. His mother died at his birth, and his only sister in early infancy. His father, a small tradesman who made picture-frames and sold stationery in Birmingham, England, was ambitious for his son to be a clergyman, and managed to give him a superior education. At nineteen the youth won a scholarship at Exeter College and went up to Oxford. There he met another freshman of Welsh birth, William Morris, and the face of things suddenly changed. Their dreams and aspirations tallied in that their deep-rooted sense of the ugliness and monotony of the present and their common love of the past drew the young undergraduates together and laid the foundation of a life-long friendship.

He and Morris were for many years co-partners in the celebrated firm of Morris and Company, and to their joint efforts the complete revolution which took place in decorative art, and drove Victorian stuffiness from our houses, is to be ascribed.

No artist was ever truer to his own ideals, for his men and women, earth, sky, rocks and trees are not of this world, but make a world of their own consistent with itself, therefore having its own reality. He was engaged on his picture of "The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon" until a few hours before his death, on June 17, 1898.