That inventiveness itself was a driving force, as Charles Eliot Norton realized when he described The Grange in 1869. "Burne-Jones's studio," he wrote, "is a large room on the gar- den side of the house. There is a pleasant look of work about it, and a general air of appropriate disorder. All round the wall, upon the floor, and on easels, lie and stand sketches or pictures in every stage of existence. Jones s lively imagination is con- tinually designing more than he can execute. His fancy cre- ates a hundred pictures for one that his hand can paint. It keeps him awake night after night with its animated sugges- tions, and each morning he covers the canvas with the outline of a new picture." Norton also noted "three or four enormous volumes filled with studies of every sort," all of them "full of exquisite feeling and grace." 11 With such pressure of work, it was hardly surprising that Burne-Jones began to employ assistants. The first was Charles Fairfax Murray (fig. 71), who was taken on in November 1866 to help with the Saint George series and soon graduated to other tasks. Not a strikingly original talent but a brilliant exe- cutant, Murray was ideal in this role. Indeed he was in much demand, also assisting Rossetti and Watts, working as a stained-glass painter for Morris, and copying Old Masters for Ruskin. In Burne-Jones's studio he was followed by T. M. Rooke (fig. 72), who arrived in 1869 and was still employed there when Burne-Jones died in 1898, and for shorter periods by others, including J. M. Strudwick (1849 -1937), Matthew Webb (ca. 1851-1924), and Francis Lathrop (1849-1909), a nephew of Nathaniel Hawthorne who later returned to America, where he practiced as a decorative artist. Harry Quilter claimed that Henry Holiday "used to work as an assis- tant" 12 and Walter Crane certainly played a large part in complet- ing the Cupid and Psyche frieze (cat. nos. 4oa-l). According to Holman Hunt, "Burne-Jones often had at work as many as twenty [assistants] at a time' 13 and although this may be a gross exaggeration, it suggests the scale, productivity, and sophisticated nature of the operation.