Ruskin's "serious talk," however important, was only one of a number of influences that Burne-Jones WW experienced in the 1860s, diverse in character but complementary in effect. Now in his thirties, the artist was facing an increasing number of personal and professional responsibilities. During the early years of their married life, he and Georgie continued to live in Bloomsbury. Having briefly occupied the rooms in Russell Place that had been his last bachelor establishment, they took a larger apartment at 62 Great Russell Street, overlooking the forecourt of the British Museum, in 1861. A son, Philip (1861-1926), was born shortly after the move, and they remained there until the winter of 1864, when a domestic cri- sis struck them, Georgie catching scarlet fever and losing her second child. Eager to put unhappy memories behind them, they then moved to 41 Kensington Square, on the other side of London. In this they were playing their part in the gener- al drift westward that characterized the Victorian art world at this period. Indeed, they were probably influenced by the fact that their friends Val Prinsep and Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), the future president of the Royal Academy, were currently building themselves studio houses not far away in Holland Park Road, thus pioneering the artists' colony that was to establish itself in the area during the next decade. The Burne-Joneses' last child, Margaret (1866-1953; cat. No. 117), was born in 1866, and the following year they moved west again, settling at The Grange, North End Lane, Fulham (fig. 68), a roomy eighteenth-century house set in a large garden, that had once belonged to the novelist Samuel Richardson. Still in a largely rural area but one that would soon see intense development, it was to remain the family's London home until Burne-Jones's death thirty-one years later. "When we turned to look around us," Georgie wrote of the move to Kensington Square, "something was gone, something had been left behind — and it was our first youth." 1 For all the circle it was a time of change. Rossetti had been established on Cheyne Walk (another move west) since October 1862, adopting a more professional attitude to work and enjoying consequent success. Madox Brown achieved temporary pros- perity following his one-man exhibition in the spring of 1865, and the same year Swinburne made his name with the publi- cation of Atalanta in Calydon, gaining further fame of a more dubious kind when Poems and Ballads appeared in 1866. In the autumn of 1865 Morris and his family moved from Red House to London so that he could be closer to the firm, and from then on he too was preoccupied with the work that would bring him fame as a poet, The Earthly Paradise.
Photographs of Burne-Jones s studios show paintings and car- toons for decorative art jumbled up together (fig. 1). He knew where everything was and moved easily between the two kinds of work, both in the pattern of his daily life and in the less pre- dictable workings of his imagination. One kind of work fed the other. In the late 1860s he drew more than a hundred illustrations for a proposed edition ofWilliam Morris's The Earthly Paradise, and out of these developed many of his paintings in the 1870s and 18 80s. This happened easily, for nearly all his paintings were decorative, and nearly all his decorative art was pictorial. We are familiar with the phrase "merely decorative. "To do jus- tice to Burne-Jones s work, we should perhaps invent its oppo- site — something like "profoundly decorative."