By about 1860 watercolour was replacing pen and ink as Burne-Jones's primary technique, this again reflecting the practice of Rossetti. During the early 1860s he painted a dis- tinct group of works in this medium, still small in scale by comparison with the later work. The well-known Sidonia von Bork and Clara von Bork (cat. nos. 12, 13) are among the earli- est examples, and the series culminates with The Merciful Knight, of 1863 (cat. no. 26), which to Georgie seemed "to sum up and seal the ten years that had passed since Edward first went to Oxford." 19 Thematically these pictures represent many of the circle s literary enthusiasms at this period: Malory (cat. no. 15), Chaucer, border ballads (fig. 56), the fairy tales of Grimm and Perrault (cat. no. 22), Wilhelm Meinhold's grue- some gothic horror story Sidonia the Sorceress. Painted with a good deal of bodycolour and a considerable amount of ox gall, they have a density and richness diametrically opposed to the translucency normally associated with watercolour. Their deep and glowing tones parallel the schemes of rich polychromy and constructional colour favored by the Gothic Revival archi- tects with whom his talents as a decorative artist brought him into contact: Benjamin Woodward, William Butterfield, G. E. Street, William Burges, J. P. Seddon, G. F. Bodley, Philip Webb, William White. Indeed, he had already begun the practice of occasionally developing a stained-glass cartoon as a watercolour, using the design s sepia outlines as a mono- chrome underpainting. But this close relationship between painting and design, which remained constant throughout his career despite outward changes of style, was only sympto- matic of a fundamental cast of vision, a natural tendency to opt for a decorative effect and to prefer mood and fairy-tale fantasy to drama and psychological insight. This is the great difference between Burne-Jones and Rossetti, for whom the latter qualities were paramount, certainly at this early period. Burne-Jones, wrote Ruskin in 1859, is "the most wonderful of all the Pre-Raphaelites in redundance of delicate and pathet- ic fancy — inferior to Rossetti in depth — but beyond him in grace and sweetness." 20
Fitzwilliam work list : 1862 I began a picture of Morgan Le Fay but could never finish it, and afterwards destroyed it, and gave the head to that scoundrel Howell.
Several versions of the storyexist to account for the picture's condition. Burne-Jones abandoned it as unsatisfactory in execution.=, and probably himself cut out the central portion, which is then said to have been stolen. Edward Clifford acquired it on the death of William Graham in 1885, and either painted in the missing parts from a needlework version by Georgiana Burne-Jones, or unearthed the original missing fragment from the artist's studio anf joined the pieces together. Burne-Jines himself then worked over the whole design. Clifford described the colour as "like Tintoretto's finest work." The year it was painted the artistspent the summer copyingdetails from pictures by Tintoretto, Veroneses ab=nd Titian in and around Venice for Ruskin. This and No, 1 [in the exhibition which is Merlin and Nimue] show the water colour tecnique which he evolved at this time to achieve richness of colour, saturatting the paper with paint, mixed with gum arabic, and later adding details in bidy colour.