radiodark:rionsanura:a-book-of-creatures:ponqo:beardbriarandrose:Sir Edward Burne-Jones, School For
radiodark:rionsanura:a-book-of-creatures:ponqo:beardbriarandrose:Sir Edward Burne-Jones, School For Dragon Babies, 1884, pencil on paperi can’t believe you posted this without posting the sequel!It gets better and betterOh my god. This is the same Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter who in the extra-dramatic BBC series about them, was played by Peter Sandys-Clarke, whose oeuvre is more usually represented by this kind of stuff:It’s that Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Who drew all the dragonbabies at school. I’m.Oh that’s delightful“A handwritten inscription states that Burne-Jones gave his daughter, Margaret, a plain sketchbook before she married and moved to 27 Young Street. It goes on to state that the book was given to his granddaughter, Angela, when she was eighteen months old and that, “E. B-J began making drawings in it for her when he came to see her” (Burne-Jones).“ sourceI’d like to postulate that the second set of dragon designs are at least a little based on a wombat his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti (an absolute madman) raised for a while starting in 1859, following a dozen years of excitement about the animal. Oone, which he aggressively named Tops after William Morris’ own nickname, allegedly met its end by eating one of Rossetti’s fancy cigars. Here’s a sketch by Burne-Jones of a wombat bounding across Egypt: A whole bunch of the Pre-Raphaelites had a phase of drawing wombats like a cute in-joke for them and their friends, so I think it was likely a very comfortable shape for Burne-Jones to cartoon.Plus anyone who’s studied dragons in european art history can tell you, folks tended to just draw them as familiar animals but with scales and tongues and such. So you get your dog-dragons and your horse-dragons and your snake-dragons. Theydies and gentlefolk, a wombat dragon! Many wombat dragons! precious <3 -- source link
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