The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
Fiona MacCarthy
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries — Edward Burne-Jones's work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became a widespread 'Burne-Jones look'. The bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but artists such as Klimt and Picasso. In this gripping book Fiona MacCarthy explores and re-evaluates his art and life — his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his art and ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator William Morris as their views on art and politics diverged.
4.4 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Art, Architecture & Photography |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
656 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0571228614 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries — Edward Burne-Jones's work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became a widespread 'Burne-Jones look'. The bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but artists such as Klimt and Picasso. In this gripping book Fiona MacCarthy explores and re-evaluates his art and life — his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his art and ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator William Morris as their views on art and politics diverged.
Read an extract from the book | Telegraph
Reviews
The Daily Express
Duncan Fallowell
"[A] wonderfully thorough and evocative biography"
02/09/2011
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The Guardian
Rosemary Hill
"The relationship that MacCarthy depicts with most warmth and subtlety is the long attachment between Burne-Jones and [William] Morris … [A] magnificent and deeply felt biography"
25/08/2011
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The Independent
Jan Marsh
"Fiona MacCarthy writes so easily that even a doorstep biography of this size is a true pleasure to read, unfolding events at an enjoyable pace and skilfully structured to avoid the drag of one-thing-after-another. This despite the lack of dramatic incident in Burne-Jones's life, except for one tumultuous episode."
02/09/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Suzi Feay
"… a rich and thought-provoking portrait. I liked Burne-Jones a bit less after reading it, but admired him a lot more."
04/09/2011
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The Sunday Times
John Carey
"[Burne-Jones'] fondness for Arthurian knights, noble ladies and saints might lead you to suppose that he was a high-souled aristocrat, profoundly religious, and drawn to feats of martial valour. In fact he was of respectable lower-middle-class stock, timid, diffident and prone to fits of nervous collapse. He had abandoned his religious faith as an undergraduate and, along with his friend the poet and pornographer Algernon Charles Swinburne, relished dirty jokes about curates. He got quite a lot of his sexual pleasure from rather creepy relationships with little girls. Far from alienating the reader, these revelations in Fiona MacCarthy’s richly anecdotal biography serve to make Burne-Jones seem more fully human, as his strangely lifeless artworks never are."
28/08/2011
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The Financial Times
Jackie Wullschlager
"The signal achievement of Fiona MacCarthy’s captivating biography The Last Pre-Raphaelite is to make a case for Edward Burne-Jones, most regressive and dreamy of all Victorian artists, as a painter with significance for modernity as well as for his own times."
09/09/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Judith Flanders
"... she gives, perhaps for the first time, equal weight to Burne-Jones’s design work, instead of relegating it to an afterthought to his paintings. Her discussions of stained-glass and wood engraving are enlightening as well as engrossing. One can’t help but feel, however, that by the end of the book MacCarthy really didn’t like, or even admire, Burne-Jones very much."
11/09/2011
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The Economist
The Economist
"Burne-Jones was a selfish Victorian in need of constant reassurance, but his biographer forgives him. In her delight in him, she leaves no stone unturned. Her book is also unusually generously illustrated with paintings, stained glass and photographs of the leading characters."
20/08/2011
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