The artist s largest work to date in oils, this triptych was painted in i860 for Saint Paul's Church, Brighton (1846-48), an early work of the mature Gothic Revival designed by Richard Cromwell Carpenter (1812-1855). In response to crit- icism in the Ecclesiologist magazine that the high altar lacked a proper focus, the architect George Frederick Bodley (1827- 1907), already on friendly terms with Morris and his circle, "unselfishly suggested that the church should have a painted altarpiece instead of a reredos, which he himself had been asked to design, and that Edward [Burne-Jones] should be the artist employed." 1 The work must have been well under way by the summer of i860, as it was commended by J. R Seddon at a meeting of the Ecclesiological Society on June 11. 2 On its com- pletion, however, the artist "found that the composition of the centre panel was too elaborate to tell its story clearly from a distance." 3 He therefore decided to paint a second version, simplifying the composition of the Adoration by removing the female attendants and the shepherds and raising the kings to a standing position on the right; it was installed in 1861 and remained in place until 1975. 4
This second triptych, framed and installed in the church on its completion (also in 1861), had each panel set in a flat, smoothly-gilded border painted with a grid of black lines and dots. This is very much in the style of the painted furniture Burne-Jones had produced with Morris in the 1850s, which is Pre-Raphaelite in its very simplified structure, and a cross between re-imagined mediaevalism and embryonic Arts & Crafts in its ornamental details and decorative finish. It is quite as avant-garde in its way as the earliest frames designed for their work by Ford Madox Brown, D.G. Rossetti and Holman Hunt. The Frame Blog