Cupid and Psyche - Palace Green Murals

Edward Burne-Jones's Cupid and Psyche murals for the Palace Green house in London — designed by Philip Webb for the collector Alexander Ionides — represent his most ambitious decorative project of the 1870s. The story of Cupid and Psyche, which Burne-Jones had been exploring since the early 1860s following William Morris's retelling, was among his most sustained mythological subjects. The murals bring together his Pre-Raphaelite linearity with his growing interest in Italian Renaissance fresco composition. The Birmingham Museum holds these panels as central works of British Aesthetic Movement decorative art, showing how Burne-Jones and his circle sought to reintegrate painting, design, and architecture that Victorian industrial culture had separated.

The mural-scale composition demands a different approach than easel painting: Burne-Jones employs flat, decorative figure groupings with clean outlines recalling Italian Early Renaissance fresco. The color is deliberately harmonious and non-naturalistic — part of the decorative scheme rather than an attempt at three-dimensional realism. Linear arabesques of drapery and figure contour are characteristic.