During his early years in London Burne-Jones lived at a
series of addresses in Bloomsbury, an area long established as
London's bohemian quarter. In August 1856, when Morris
moved with Street to London, the friends shared rooms in
Upper Gordon Street, and the following November they took
a first-floor apartment at 17 Red Lion Square, which had once
been tenanted by Rossetti and the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite
painter Walter Deverell. But in 1859 this bachelor world was
breached when Morris married Jane Burden (1839-1914), the
daughter of an Oxford groom and a young woman of uncon-
ventional beauty whom he had met while working at the
Oxford Union. He also commissioned Webb to design a
house for him in the country. The result was the famous Red
House at Upton in Kent (fig. 53), a plain (by Victorian stan-
dards) red-brick building set amid apple orchards and a gar-
den designed to resemble the hortus conclusus of a
late-medieval illuminated manuscript. The decoration of this
idyllic retreat, to which Burne-Jones contributed a series of
murals (cat. no. 11), was the prelude to the founding of the firm
in 1861.