Burne-Jones Talking: His Conversations 1895-1898 Preserved by His Studio Assistant Thomas Rooke

Conversations of the great artist and designer, as set down by his studio assistant
 
"To know his work without his talk is 'not to know him' . . . only when they are side by side is the common origin and aim seen and the complete man displayed."  —Thomas Rooke 
 
The man revealed here with startling freshness and immediacy is far from the familiar painter of knightly melancholy and abstract angels. Edward Burne-Jones emerges as a loveable and charming man, far more practical, down-to-earth, witty, and ironic than might have been expected. He may still regret that he was not born in the Middle Ages and reminisce about the golden years with William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850s and '60s, but he is still hard at work on his last great collaboration with Morris, the Kelmscott Chaucer, while not hesitating to fulminate about Britain's imperial pretensions and the hypocrisy that accompanied them. And he is unfailingly articulate when it comes to discussing the craft of painting in relation to himself, his contemporaries, and the giants of the past.