The Garden Court

In an enclosed garden court, slender figures move or rest between low walls and clipped greenery, a hushed, dreamlike stillness filling the narrow, frieze-like sheet. Edward Burne-Jones made this carefully finished watercolor and gouache in the early 1870s, at the height of his association with William Morris and the decorative arts movement that he helped to renew. The elongated, reverent figures, the muted colors and the almost hieratic balance of the composition exemplify the idealizing, otherworldly art that made him the leading painter of the British Pre-Raphaelite circle in its later phase.