The four lectures in this seminar will explore how British artists Edward Burne-Jones and Evelyn Pickering de Morgan pursued beauty—both tangible and metaphysical—through their paintings. Burne-Jones was a leading figure of the later Pre-Raphaelite movement, and his younger contemporary De Morgan was a pioneering woman artist within the movement’s orbit. Both artists drew deeply on imagery from antiquity and the Renaissance, and they shared many of the aesthetic ideals first championed by earlier Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Marie Spartali Stillman. Their works emphasized harmony, moral resonance, and an elevated vision of nature as a pathway to higher meaning. Examples of their art can be found in several museums and churches in Boston and Cambridge, where their distinctive interpretations of beauty can be experienced firsthand.
Class Recordings: