Born on 28 August 1833 at 11 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham, Edward Coley Jones was the son of a local frame-maker and gilder. He spent the first two decades of his life in Birmingham, a city whose thriving metalwork and decorative-arts industries profoundly shaped his visual sensibilities. In 1860, wishing to honour his mother’s family, he added “Burne” to his surname; the hyphenated form Burne-Jones was adopted only after his baronetcy in 1894.

Burne-Jones’s early artistic development ran parallel to the rise of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, whose ideals of medievalism, sincerity, and intense colour would define his career. Before the creation of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861, he designed stained glass for several manufacturers, but it was as a founding member of “the Firm” that he found his true medium. He quickly became its principal designer, responsible for over five hundred individual figure cartoons, and effectively set the visual tone of Morris stained glass for the next half-century.

His windows are distinguished by their tall, lyrical figures, subtle modelling, and the contemplative inwardness that became his hallmark. Angels, in particular, were central to his artistic vocabulary. In a celebrated exchange with Oscar Wilde, Burne-Jones defended the spiritual purpose of his work:

“The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels I shall paint.
Their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.”

Burne-Jones accepted a baronetcy in 1894, a rare honour for an artist of his generation. He died in 1898, and is buried in the churchyard at Rottingdean, Sussex, near his beloved home, The Grange.

Today he is regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the nineteenth century, and the principal creative force behind the stained glass of Morris & Co., whose distinctive angelic and saintly figures continue to define the English Arts & Crafts aesthetic.