Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898) is best known as a painter, but a large part of his reputation rests on windows. He drew the designs, and the firm he helped to found with William Morris made them. Between them they gave Victorian stained glass a new look: long, graceful figures, deep colour and a flat, tapestry-like pattern in place of the crowded scenes of the mid-century.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co
Burne-Jones was a founding partner, with William Morris, in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co, set up in 1861 to produce decorative arts of all kinds. The firm was reorganised as Morris & Co in 1875. Stained glass was one of its mainstays. Burne-Jones supplied cartoons, and the firm’s craftsmen translated them into glass. The partnership is one of the foundations of the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued well-made hand work over factory production.
Birmingham Cathedral
Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham, and the church where he was baptised, St Philip’s, is now Birmingham Cathedral. It holds four of his windows, made by Morris & Co: the Ascension (1885), the Nativity and the Crucifixion (both 1887 to 1888) and the Last Judgement (1897). The cathedral says that after the church commissioned the Ascension, he admired the result so much that he designed the others himself. The Last Judgement is often regarded as his finest window, and the cathedral records that William Morris chose the colours for all four.
The colours are the first thing most visitors notice: saturated blues, ruby reds and greens, with the figures drawn in clear outline and relatively little shading, which makes the windows read well from the far end of the building.
What to look for
Look at the folds of the drapery, drawn with a few strong lines rather than painted in detail, and at the tall, slender figures, which are typical of Burne-Jones. Compare them with the more detailed painting of earlier Victorian windows, and with the opalescent layered glass favoured at the same time in America by Tiffany and La Farge. For the Gothic Revival background, see a short history of stained glass and the ecclesiastical stained glass page.
Sources and further reading
- Smarthistory: Burne-Jones windows at Birmingham Cathedral
- Birmingham Cathedral: who was Edward Burne-Jones
More artists
Also on this site: Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Comfort Tiffany, John La Farge, Harry Clarke, Marc Chagall, John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens. See all artists.
For the wider story, see Stained Glass from the Gothic Revival to the Twentieth Century and A Short History of Stained Glass.