Based on a cartoon for stained glass in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, 1871. No doubt Burne-Jones would not have been so addicted to series — whether in the context of illustration, decoration, or painting — if they had not satisfied his phenomenal powers of invention. There are times when his vision has an almost cin- ematic quality; it was as though he found it easier to visualize a subject in terms of a series of frames than as a single, all- embracing image. In much the same way, it was his penchant for compositions based on a single figure — that tendency so encouraged by Ruskin with his talk of "beautiful things or creatures" represented "in perfect repose" but replete with alle- gorical significance — that made him so ready to paint easel ver- sions of standing figures conceived to fill the narrow upright lights of stained-glass windows. Reference has already been made to Hope (cat. no. 163) and to the watercolours of girls gath- ering flowers based on the glass at South Kensington. Saint George (cat. no. 85) belongs to the same category, and there are many other examples: Caritas, Fides (fig. 81), Temperantia, The Days of Creation (fig. 79), paintings of the Cumaean and Delphic Sibyls (fig. 82). In fact, Burne-Joness fondness for this format led him to adopt it for paintings which had no connection with stained glass: Leyland's Seasons, The Wheel of Fortune (cat. no. 52), The Depths of the Sea (cat. no. 119).
Foord & Dickinson, 129 Wardour Street, London were framers.
Elizabeth Mary Foord’s husband, George, died in 1842, leaving her to manage Foord’s, the well-known picture framemakers in Wardour Street, Soho, until her death in 1856. Most unusually, she left her daughters the business, which then traded as Eliza & C. Foord, but evidently she had reservations since she stipulated that the business was ‘to be carried on under the entire and sole management of William Dickinson’, her foreman. If her daughters were to marry, the business and stock would pass to their brother Charles Foord and to Dickinson, as apparently happened in 1859 when the firm became Foord & Dickinson. Eliza & C. Foord supplied several frames to the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in 1857 (fig. 3), and the firm did much work for the Pre-Raphaelites and other leading artists.