From the prize winning author of William Morris comes a new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the greatest British artist of the second half of the nineteenth century. The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones' work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became a widespread 'Burne-Jones look'. The bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but artists such as Klimt and Picasso. In this gripping book Fiona MacCarthy explores and re-evaluates his art and life - his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his art and ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator William Morris as their views on art and politics diverged. With new research and fresh historical perspective, "The Last Pre-Raphaelite" tells the extraordinary, dramatic story of Burne-Jones as an artist, a key figure in Victorian society and a peculiarly captivating man.
A well-known broadcaster and critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed book
Eric Gill, published in 1989. Her biography of Byron was described by A. N. Wilson as 'a flawless triumph' and
William Morris won the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. She most recently published
Last Curtsey, a memoir of her early life as a debutante.
Fiona is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Hon. Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2009.
