The Last Pre-Raphaelite

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, this is the biography of celebrated nineteenth-century artist Edward Burne-Jones, who - with William Morris - connects Victorian and modern art. 'A triumph of biographical art.' Independent 'Magnificent.' Guardian 'Rarely are biographies both as authoritative and engaging as this.' Literary Review The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones's work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became an iconic 'Burne-Jones look'. Widely recognised as the bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but European artists such as Klimt and Picasso. In this gripping book, award-winning biographer Fiona MacCarthy dramatically re-evaluates his art and life - his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his work but ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, and the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator, William Morris, when their views on art and politics diverged. Blending new research with a fresh historical perspective, The Last Pre-Raphaelite tells the extraordinary story of Burne-Jones: a radical artist, landmark of Victorian society - and peculiarly captivating man.

A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994), won the Wolfson History Prize. Her Byron:Life and Legend (2002) has been described as 'one of the great literary biographies of our time'. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE in 2009. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She was married to David Mellor, one of Britain's leading industrial designers. She died in 2020 at the age of 80.