Portrait of Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898 )

Watts painted his portrait of Edward Burne-Jones in 1869, capturing his younger friend and fellow Romantic idealist at a formative period in Burne-Jones's career. By 1869 Burne-Jones had completed his apprenticeship to Rossetti and was developing his own highly distinctive aesthetic — an art of dreamlike beauty, medieval romance, and tragic mythology that would make him the defining painter of the Aesthetic Movement in British art. Watts and Burne-Jones shared deep friendships and overlapping preoccupations: both were committed to transcendent beauty, both drew on classical and medieval sources, and both rejected the prevailing materialist values of industrial Victorian culture. The Birmingham Museums Trust's canvas shows Watts applying his mature portrait intelligence to a subject he genuinely admired and understood. The portrait belongs to a series of 'Hall of Fame' portraits that Watts produced of the outstanding figures of his age — his gift to posterity of the faces of those who had enriched Victorian civilisation.

The oil on canvas uses Watts's mature portrait technique: warm atmospheric background, carefully glazed luminosity in the face, and deliberate suppression of costume detail to concentrate all expressive weight on physiognomy. The rendering of Burne-Jones's rather fine, sensitive features captures the quality of aesthetic receptivity that contemporaries consistently noted in the younger painter's appearance.