Edward Burne-Jones, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries in the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements, has suffered from a distinct lack of exposure.

This book reassesses this comparatively little-known personality and to appreciate the range of his art. Not merely a pupil of Rossetti, Burne-Jones was a pioneering and profound imagination in his own right, and he channelled the anguish of his sometimes turbulent private life into art of great dramatic tension.

His life epitomises the dilemma of the nineteenth-century thinker faced with the problems of the new scientific, materialistic philosophy, and his art displays a reaction to the zealous religiousness of the Gothic Revival; like Rossetti, he finds a compelling new religion in sensualism and the imagination.