The Backgammon Players

Among Burne-Jones's earliest surviving oil paintings, The Backgammon Players of 1861 documents a moment when his Pre-Raphaelite influences — particularly Rossetti, with whom he was in close contact — were most strongly felt. The subject of figures engaged in a board game had medieval and Renaissance precedents that would have appealed to the Pre-Raphaelite circle's historicizing interests. At this date, Burne-Jones had only recently transitioned from his initial career path and was still developing his mature style. The intimate, small-scale subject — figures gathered around a game — allowed him to work out figure placement and interior setting without the ambitions of large narrative composition. The Birmingham Museums Trust's holdings of Burne-Jones's early work provide an important document of his development from a Rossetti follower into a major independent artistic personality.

The early date suggests a handling less technically assured than his mature works, with greater evidence of working and reworking visible in the surface. The influence of Rossetti is likely apparent in the figure types and the tight, somewhat airless interior space. Color in these early works tends toward the intense, jewel-like primary hues that the Pre-Raphaelites favored before the more muted, harmonically complex palette of his later period.