More commonly an excuse for high drama and dynamic design, the legend of St George inspired in Edward Burne-Jones a typically lyrical response. This image presents the viewer with something akin to a dream. The knight is hardy enough, dispatching his beastly (but undernourished) enemy with assurance; yet this St George is a creature of the mind. The blurry 'sfumato' of the forms - Burne-Jones had yet to perfect his brittle manner - and the elegance of the poses encourage reverie, not alarm. Burne-Jones was the least ideological of the Pre-Raphaelites, yet the most enduring, always keeping faith with a moonlit world of bloodless damsels and epicene saints. Henry James called the Burne-Jones type 'pale, sickly and wan'. No progressive, the English artist loathed the impressionists, preferring their symbolist contemporaries, whom he admired and greatly influenced. AGNSW Handbook, 1999.
William Morris's The Earthly Paradise "The Doom of King Acrisius" quoted in the Mclean Gallery 1895 exhibition catalogue ".... The hero stood, His bright face shadowed by the jaws of death, His hair blown backward by the poisonous breath, ...... as the blue blade did meet The wrinkled neck, and with no faltering stroke, Like a god's hand the fell enchantment broke"
25 April 1895 Agnews bought them and had them oiled out4 and varnished and properly framed. Gooden then bought them and sold a half share in them to McLean who exhibited them at his place in Hay Market5. They are the cheapest lot of Burne-Jones's on the market, if you know of any friends who have a house big enough to hold them. 2 of them are as big as your [Samuel Bancroft] Briar Rose (197). 2 about 2/3rds this size and 3 others small. The difficulty is to sell them in the lump. Agnew was disposed to break them up if he hadn't sold them immediately and I expect that will be their ultimate fate.6 4. A process of rubbing the picture surface with oil to restore its original colour. 5. Thomas McLean's Gallery at 7 the Haymarket. 6. The set was dispersed.
13 May 1895 I do not know what the St. George pictures (!(") will go for but I believe 7,000. Everything depends on what E.B.J. will charge for retouching them as he wishes to do.
27 February [1897] I know exactly where E. B. J. got his Story of St. George from. He usually consulted Mrs. Jameson's "Sacred and Legendary Art"2 for the Lives of saints. I have referred to her book but the legend differs in details. he has probably supplemented it from other sources, but for all the details he would not be bound by any authority. 2. Anna Brownell Jameson. Sacred and legendary Art. London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. 1848