Edward Burne-Jones

Myths, legends and sagas come to life in the works of the great Victorian painter, which usher the beholder into a silent world fall of beauty and harmony, but also informed by undercurrents of terror and danger. The Staatsgalerie, the most important Burne-Jones collection in Germany, will be showing the first monographic exhibition on Burne-Jones to be presented in Germany, scheduled to open on 24 October 2009. The show will focus on Burne-Jones’s major narrative cycles. Since 1971, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart has been in the possession of a chief work of Pre-Raphaelite painting: Perseus, a cycle consisting of eight paintings and studies by Edward Burne-Jones. This work will serve as the point of departure for the exhibtion. In addition for example his large-scale Briar Rose works with their references to Art Nouveau ornamentation, or the tapestries devoted to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table will be on view. The show’s title alludes to one of the most important literary sources from which Burne Jones drew the inspiration for his narrative cycles: William Morris’s best-selling Earthly Paradise. At the same time, it also characterizes one of the painter’s primary conceptual concerns, for his entire oeuvre can be understood as an idealistic alternative to the prosaic everyday life of the Late Victorian period – shaped, as it was, by the impact of the industrial revolution