An illustration of the reason for the artist's despair on his return from Italy when he faced at least sixty unfinished canvasses.
This sketch of Burne-Jones's studio is hardly exaggerated. It was never one of the 'show' studios of the period like those of Millais, Leighton or Alma-Tadema, and it was certainly crowded. Charles Eliot Norton wrote of ity in 1869: 'there is a pleasant look of work about it, and a general air of appropriate disorder. All around the wall, on the floor, and on easels lie and stand sketches or pictures in every stage of existence. Jones's lively imagination is continually designing more than he can execute ...' This is the studio inside The Grange, shown after the insertion of a skylight in 1873. In 1882 another studio was built at the bottom of the garden.