The Star of Bethlehem by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. 1887-1891. Watercolour and bodycolour with scraping, on ten sheets of J. Whatman Turkey Mill Kent paper dated 1882 or 1883, on a stretcher. H 299 x W 423 cm. Image credit: Birmingham Museums Trust. Accession no. 1891P75, commissioned from the artist by the Corporation of Birmingham, 1887, and purchased through the Art Gallery Purchase Fund, 1891. Image kindly made available by Birmingham Museums via the Art UK website, on the Creative Commons Zero licence (public domain).
The Adoration of the Magi (1882), Burne-Jones's earlier and very much smaller design for a tapestry.
Burne-Jones's great watercolour was based on an earlier design for a tapestry, on the subject of The Adoration of the Magi. Painted in 1882, and executed in watercolor, gouache and gold paint, the design only measures 26 x 38 inches. The resulting tapestry was woven at Merton Abbey in 1890 and presented by the artist to Exeter College, Oxford, which had commissioned it from William Morris in 1886. The design was a popular one, and more tapestries were made up for it, including one currently at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and another in the collection of the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Victoria Osborne explains how the final large watercolour came to be produced:
In the months since the success of the Burne-Jones loan exhibition [at the new art gallery and museum in Birmingham], Whitworth Wallis [its first director] and his colleagues had turned their focus to how “our great poet-painter” might be represented in the museum in a more lasting way. In 1887 the Birmingham Corporation commissioned a work from Burne-Jones for the permanent collection for the substantial fee of two thousand pounds (roughly two-hundred seventy-five thousand dollars today). The artist responded with an extraordinary tour de force: The Star of Bethlehem, a watercolor almost thirteen feet across, painted in rich and glowing tones on ten sheets of the largest watercolor paper then commercially available, laid onto canvas.... The Star of Bethlehem was completed in Burne-Jones's large garden studio in Fulham in early 1891 and exhibited at the New Gallery in London before being brought up to Birmingham in September of the same year. [78]
There are subtle differences between the design and the much larger watercolour, but it is clear that the same inspiration lay behind them both. — Jacqueline Banerjee
The second image comes from Fine Art Society, London, which has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web. This generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society. GPL
Bibliography
Morris and Company. London: The Fine Art Society, 1979. No. 184.
Osborne, Victoria. "'A New Order of Things': The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy and Art in Birmingham." Victorian Radicals, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement, by Martin Ellis, Victoria Osborne and Tim Barringer. Munich, London, New York: American Federation of Arts, Del Monico Books/Prestel, 2018. 71-87.
The Star of Bethlehem. Art UK. Web. 20 July 2024.
Created 17 May 2007
Last modified 20 July 2024