Sir Edward Burne-Jones was known as the greatest artist of the second phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. As a child, he lost his mother at birth and his father was so physically distressed over her death, he not able to show love towards his infant son, Edward. To make-up for his unhappy childhood, Edward turned to an imaginary world that would last throughout his life in his paintings.

While studying at Oxford, Edward was heading for the ministry when he met his lifelong friend and close associate, William Morris. Together they discovered the Pre-Raphaelites and both developed a fascination with Arthurian legend. Burne-Jones was always fascinated by mythology of the classics. The medieval and mystical elements he found in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings clearly appealed to him. He attempted to bring many of the medieval romantic themes back to life with his paintings.

In the early 1850's, Jones met his artistic hero, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who convinced him to change his path and devote his life to painting. Edward Burne-Jones became an agnostic, replacing religion with art.

Soon after changing his life's ambitions, he also changed his name "Jones" to "Burne-Jones" to differentiate himself from all the other Jones who painted.

Edward Burne-Jones shared many of the same concerns as other Pre-Raphaelites. He wanted to restore to art, the purity of form, stylization, and high moral tone of medieval painting and design. He was also prominent in the revival of medieval applied arts, led by his Oxford friend the poet and artist William Morris. For Morris's firm he designed stained-glass windows, mosaics, tapestries, and illustrating books.

Burne-Jones also did some drawings to illustrate for William Morris' poem, The Earthly Paradise, but only one of them was used when the book was published. It would be years before Burne-Jones and Morris would, once again, collaborate on a book, Kelmscott Chaucer. For Kelmscott Chaucer, the complete works of England's first poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edward Burne-Jones designed 87 wood engravings.

Burne-Jones insisted on the importance of drawing every day, and filled dozens of sketchbooks with studies of all kinds. Some of his sketchbooks were filled with rapid composition studies, and others, showed a deliberate painstaking study for finished works. Prior to starting a large painting, he was known to have made innumerable studies of limbs, drapery and other objects in chalk or pencil. It was from these studies he created his paintings.

By the 1870's Edward Burne-Jones a success within his small circle of rich patrons and friends but his reluctance to show his work publicly kept him virtually unknown to the general public. In 1877 when he was finally persuaded to exhibit some of his paintings, he became an overnight success and was regarded as one of the greatest living artists.

By the time of his sudden death, in 1898, Edward Coley Jones had been given the Legion of Honor, made a baronet, knighted in 1894, and a memorial exhibition of his work was held the year of his death. After that, his work was not seen again for 77 years. Victorian art was poorly regarded during most of the twentieth century and only recently has he taken his place in the history of art.

Today, we see more greeting cards by Edward Burne-Jones than he ever saw during his lifetime. He only entered one painting in a show at the Royal Academy and to our knowledge, did not win.