Edward Burne-Jones is well known as a Pre-Raphelite painter, but little is known about his life. Here, in her first book, Penelope Fitzgerald paints a portrait of one of the most interesting and individual of all Victorian artists. Having apprenticed himself to Rossetti in 1856, and influenced by early Italian Renaissance art, Burne-Jones sought to create images of another world, "a beautiful romantic dream, of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any that ever shone, in a land no-one can define or remember, only desire, and the forms divinely beautiful." With his paintings of mythical and medieval subjects he eventually achieved great success worldwide, and had a considerable influence on the French and Catalan Symbolists.