THE FLOWER BOOK - EDWARD BURNE JONES

The Flower Book consists of thirty-eight watercolours, tiny roundels, each some six inches across. In his list of works Burne-Jones described them as ’a series of illustrations to the Names of Flowers’. He used traditional flower names as stepping-stones into his own imaginative world: as his wife put it, ’not a single flower itself appears’. She wrote of Burne-Jones’s aims in detail in her introduction to the 1905 facsimile of the book: At first he thought any lovely or romantic name would lend itself to his purpose, but soon found ... that comparatively few were of use. Such as had too obvious a meaning as for instance ODIN’S HELM or FAIR MAID OF FRANCE, he rejected because there was not any reserve of thought in them for imagination to work upon. A picture, he held, should be no faint echo of other men’s thoughts, but “a voice concurrent or prophetical“. It was easy enough, he said, merely to illustrate, but he wanted to add to the meaning of words or to wring thei