The Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones was once asked by a young girl if he believed the story he had painted in The Star of Bethlehem. According to his long-suffering wife Georgiana, the daughter of a Methodist minister, he replied: “It’s too beautiful not to be true.”
The Nativity story is represented by a tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi from late in the artist’s life in a glorious new exhibition at Tate Britain – the first in London since 1975, and the first at the Tate since 1933, the centenary of the artist’s birth. There’s also a newly restored triptych, The Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi, and a painting in a very medieval style, The Annunciation (the Flower of God), both from earlier in his career. Burne-Jones didn’t paint many religious scenes, but The Morning of the Resurrection, with Mary Magdalene surprised by the risen Christ, is the one most representative of his style.
