St George and the Dragon

Edward Burne-Jones

Date: c. 1865

Materials: Black chalk, heightened with white 

Commission in Surrey

As part of the decoration of his house at Witley in Surrey, the successful watercolourist Myles Birket Foster commissioned from Burne-Jones a series of seven canvases illustrating the story of St. George. By the end of 1865, he had finished three of the paintings, but the others took an additional two years to complete.

Compositional alterations

St. George and the Dragon is the most dramatic of the scenes, and one which passed through a number of compositional alterations. This powerful drawing - one of fifteen studies for this subject alone in the Birmingham collection - must have been an early idea, as Burne-Jones reversed the figures of the saint and the dragon in the final painting (now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney).