Edward Burne-Jones. The Flower Book

Believing in the limitless possibilities of technological progress, artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites in England and Symbolists on the continent turned away in the 19th century. Backward-looking, they fled into their visions and elegiac images of a lost, better world, including Edward Burne-Jones. In his last ten years, he devoted himself to working on small-format circular images in a mixture of watercolor and pastel. Her motives were inspired by extraordinary and little-known flower names. The more mysterious a name sounded, the more intensively it sparked the imagination of the artist. This is how flower paintings were created, which in no way resemble those in books that were fashionable in the 19th century. His paintings were to be mirrors of his inner world, which was filled with Celtic and ancient heroes, biblical figures and secret longings. Five years after his death, the artist's wife chose 38 of the leftover circulars that appeared in the Flower Book in 1905. This largely forgotten book is now comprehensively presented in all its splendor, located in the context of book art and English garden art and related to Dante's visions of the future.