Hand-Painted Fine Art Reproductions of Famous Paintings

Annunciations became something of a stock-in-trade for Burne-Jones: the same subject, along with a Nativity, had been commissioned from him in 1862 for a bible produced by the Dalziel brothers, and on numerous subsequent occasions for stained glass. In this version, the expulsion from Eden frieze on the wall was derived directly from a stained-glass design. Sketches for the composition are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the original cartoon re-worked in watercolour in the Castle Museum, Norwich. The oil, which was originally in the George Howard collection, was modelled by Sara Prinsep's niece Julia. In 1878 she had become the wife of the writer Leslie Stephen, and was appropriately painted while pregnant with her first child, Vanessa Stephen, later Bell (herself destined to become an artist, and the elder sister of Virginia Woolf), who was born on 3 May 1879. Having decided against a career in the church, the myth and mystery of his art became a substitute for religion in Burne-Jones's life. He created a highly personal adaptation of the Christian view of life, in Lord David Cecil's words, making it 'a search for spiritual salvation to be achieved with the help of the specifically Christian virtues of charity, humility and mercy', yet despite the gravity of his religious subjects, and especially his church stained-glass work, Burne-Jones's mythological works are invariably more deeply felt and convincing.