White Garden 1905

Edward Burne-Jones made this roundel, White Garden, using colored pencil. It looks like he built up the image through soft, repeated marks, a kind of gentle accumulation of strokes. I can imagine Burne-Jones at work, coaxing these ethereal figures into being with delicate pressure. What do you think he was thinking about as he rendered these long-limbed angels and tiny, blooming flowers? Was he concerned with precision? Or was he trying to evoke a certain mood? The texture is built up with small hatch marks. I think of other artists who worked this way, Seurat and his pointillist paintings, but something about this feels more searching, as though each tiny mark is tentative, searching for a form that's already in his mind's eye, but is taking its time to appear. It’s an ongoing conversation. Each painting, each drawing, is a proposition, an idea, a question. And each artist responds to what came before, adding to the conversation across time.