Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)

The Flower Book: IV. Traveller’s Joy.

The Flower Book XXXII : « Honour’s Prize »

 

1905

 

Lithographie, rehauts de gouache

31 x 25 cm

 

Exposé en Juin-Juillet 2005, «  The Brotherhood of Ruralists and the Pre-Raphaelites », Leicester Galleries, Londres.

 

Burne-Jones a travaillé sur le Flower Book, une série de trente huit aquarelles,  de 1882 jusqu’à sa mort en 1898. Ces deux planches sont tirées de l’édition d’Henri Piazza et Cie pour la Fine Art Society sous la direction de Georgiana Burne-Jones, 1905.

 

« The pictures in this book are not of flowers themselves, but of subjects suggested by their names. The first meaning of many of these has long been forgotten, and new meanings are here found for them in the imagination of the artist ». He began the series for his own pleasure in 1882, as rest from more laborious work, keeping by him a list of beautiful names that he had met with & choosing subjects amongst them from time to time according to his mood. All the pictures take the same form, a circle about six inches in diameter kind of magic mirror in which the vision appears and he wished them not to be separated, because, wide as is their scope, one spirit, that of pure fantasy, unites them. Many of the paintings draw on Arthurian and classical legend, and on the Bible, and some are re-workings of favourite themes, for example `Wake, Dearest!’ depicts `The Sleeping Beauty’, a story he turned to again and again in his several `Briar Rose’ series. These freely worked little pictures, some of them unfinished, were done purely for the artist’s own pleasure and it may be for this reason that they possibly contain `a fuller expression of himself than exists elsewhere in his work’. Georgiana Burne-Jones – From the Preface.