Oxford’s profound influence on Edward Burne-Jones and other Pre-Raphaelite painters is highlighted in Fiona MacCarthy’s The Last Pre-Raphaelite (Faber, £25).
She argues that the city’s medieval architecture, in the days before the Gothic suburban building of North Oxford or the expansion to Cowley, provided him with an imaginative backdrop for his burgeoning romanticism. She points to his watercolour of Fair Rosamund, with its “intensely remembered imagery of Oxford, its townscape and its countryside, its winding streets and stoneroofed houses”.
Many of Burne-Jones’s paintings are owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, but there are also many examples of his work in Oxford, including stained glass at Christ Church, the murals at the Oxford Union and his tapestry for the chapel at his old college, Exeter.
His oil painting The Rose Bower is at Buscot Park, and the Ashmolean has more than 100 of his works.
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