FAMAG 1923.21
A cassetta frame with a flat frieze ornamented with a shallow applied candelabrum decoration, with urns in the bottom corners, and top and bottom central foliate motifs.
About this work
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Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley ARA OWS (1833-1898): Study for the Knight, The Briar Rose Series, charcoal, chalk and gouache on paper adhered to canvas, 123 x 53 cms. Presented to the Corporation of Falmouth in 1923 by Alfred A. De Pass, in memory of his sons.
More information about the frame
This revival of a Renaissance cassetta pattern was designed by the artist and used frequently for his work. Burne-Jones had good reason to be more than usually sensitive to the effect of framing on his paintings, since his father, Edward Richard Jones, was a gilder and framemaker. As a child Burne-Jones was brought up between the showroom and the workshop of a house with a pilastered façade that resembled a Renaissance altar-piece, and his early works were framed by his father.
His first designs were influenced by the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, which were derived from early Flemish frames and embellished with their own complex geometric motifs. After 1870, however, Burne-Jones adopted the Classical vocabulary of the Italian Renaissance, including the aedicular altarpiece frame (see next entry).
Like Francis Bacon, Burne-Jones expressed a marked preference for glazing his pictures. He wrote: ?I like a picture so much better under glass, it is like a kind of aethereal varnish. It is wonderful to me how people don?t see that a picture under glass is so much more beautiful than without it ? they are so insensitive.?