caption

Frances Horner, after Edward Burne-Jones, Angel carrying Roses

Photo courtesy of Dave Penman (All Rights Reserved)

Details

Country House
Mells Manor
Title(s)
Angel carrying Roses
Date
c.1878
Medium and support
Embroidery
Dimensions
Overall height: 41 cm, Overall width: 20 cm
Artists
Frances Horner (1854-1940), after Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
Catalogue Number
MM71

Description

Among the many items at Mells Manor that attest to Burne-Jones’s affections for Frances Graham is a series of embroideries on which they collaborated. In these designs, Burne-Jones would draw figures onto stretched cloth, allowing Frances to embroider over his marks before painting in the more delicate features of the hands and face himself. The figure in this embroidery is taken from Burne-Jones’s watercolour St Theophilus and the Angel, signed and dated 1863. Although the watercolour was destroyed during the Second World War, a second version made by Burne-Jones in 1866 survives, as well as a photogravure of the original made around 1900.1 The embroidery depicts the figure at the far left of Burne-Jones’s watercolour dressed in white robes with curly flaxen hair, surrounded by an aureole of silver and gold thread, and carrying a basket of roses and fruit.

by Devon Cox

Bibliography

Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, London : Barrie Jenkins, 1989, fig. 164, p. 114


Footnotes

  1. The replica watercolour of 1866 was sold by Sotheby’s, London, 15 November 2011 (66). The photogravure was published c.1900 by the Berlin Photographic Company, London and New York.

    1

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