In other pictures he abandons all attempt to introduce ideas, confining himself to the simple grouping of tender girlish figures, by means of which he makes a beautiful composition of the most subtle lines, forms, colours, and gestures. The "Golden Stairs" of 1878 was a picture of this description: a train of girls, beautiful as angels, descended the steps without aim or object, most of them with musical instruments, and all with the same delicate feet and the same robes falling in beautiful folds. In this year he also produced "Venus' Looking-glass": a number of nymphs assembled by the side of a clear pool at sunset, in the midst of a sad and solemn landscape, are kneeling by the water's edge together, reflected in its surface.
[Illustration: BURNE-JONES. THE WOOD NYMPH.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
Besides these numerous canvases, mention must be made of the decorative works of the master. For the English church in Rome, Burne-Jones has designed decorations in a rich and grave Byzantine style, and in England, where mural decoration has little space accorded to it in churches, there is all the more comprehensive scope for painting upon glass. Until the sixties church windows of this kind were almost exclusively ordered from Germany. The court depôt of glass-painting in Munich provided for the adornment of Glasgow Cathedral from drawings by Schwind, Heinrich Hess, and Schraudolph, and for the windows of St. Paul's from designs by Schnorr, while Kaulbach was employed for a public building in Edinburgh. In these days Burne-Jones reigns over this whole province. Where the German masters handled glass-painting by modernising it like a Nazarene fresco, Burne-Jones, who has penetrated deeply into the mediæval treatment of form, created a new style in glass-painting, and one exquisitely in keeping with the Neo-Gothic architecture of England. His most important works of this description are probably the glass windows which he designed for St. Martin's Church and St. Philip's Church in Birmingham, his native town. These labours of his in the province of Gothic window-painting explain how he came to his style of painting at the easel: he habituated himself to compose his pictures with the architectonical sentiment of a Gothic artist. Forced to satisfy the requisitions of the slender, soaring Gothic style, he came to paint his tall, straight-lined figures, the composition of which is not triangular in the old fashion, but formed in long lines as in vertical church windows.