The Work
Edward Burne-Jones painted several versions of the Annunciation, the largest and most accomplished of which is the 1879 oil painting now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (a version is also at Birmingham Museums). The painting presents the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary in a marble architectural setting of pure, cool luminosity - both figures clothed in white robes that fall in precise Gothic-revival folds, Gabriel holding a lily stem, Mary with hands crossed in reception. The encounter is depicted not as a moment of drama or surprise but as a still, mutually reverent meeting of two beings who share a secret that has not yet been spoken aloud.
Biblical Source
Luke 1:28 - 'Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you' - is Gabriel's greeting. Luke 1:38 - 'I am the Lord's servant. May your word to me be fulfilled' - is Mary's response, and it is the theological and psychological center of Burne-Jones's image: the absolute still moment between address and acceptance in which the fate of the Incarnation hangs in balance. The painting's silence captures the space between these two verses.
The Artist
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the leading painter of the second generation of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and one of the central figures of the Aesthetic Movement. His partnership with William Morris in the decorative arts firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. made his Annunciation and other biblical and Arthurian subjects enormously influential in Victorian interior decoration, church stained glass, and textile design. Burne-Jones's Annunciations are among the defining images of Victorian religious art and set the visual tone for the aesthetic sensibility of the 1870s and 1880s.
Iconography
Unlike the dramatic, confrontational angel of Rossetti's Annunciation (1850) or the more conventional domestic setting of other Victorian treatments, Burne-Jones creates an encounter between two equally luminous, equally serene beings. Gabriel is not frightening; Mary is not afraid. Both exist in a realm of absolute Aesthetic calm, a world of pure beautiful form that Burne-Jones understood as the natural environment of the divine. The lily Gabriel carries is the traditional symbol of purity and the Annunciation - rooted in Isaiah 35:1's 'the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose' - but here its symbolism is absorbed into the visual harmony of the whole.
Significance
Burne-Jones's Annunciation series was extraordinarily influential on Victorian and Edwardian religious art, establishing a visual vocabulary of calm, aesthetic reverence that shaped church decoration, stained glass design, and private devotional art for two generations. His collaboration with Morris on fabric and stained glass versions of Annunciation subjects spread the imagery far beyond the gallery context into parish churches throughout Britain. The fusion of Gothic revival architecture and Pre-Raphaelite figure drawing in these works is the definitive Victorian synthesis.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement of which Burne-Jones was the leading second-generation figure had from its beginning been deeply engaged with religious subject matter, particularly with the medieval Christian tradition that the original Brotherhood associated with authentic spiritual expression. But where Hunt, Millais, and the first generation had pursued a kind of documentary naturalism in their religious works -- attempting to render biblical scenes with historical accuracy and emotional directness -- Burne-Jones moved in a quite different direction: toward an idealized, aestheticized beauty that treated religious subjects as occasions for the embodiment of spiritual transcendence through formal perfection.
His Annunciation works, of which the most important are the 1861 watercolor, the 1879 large oil at Port Sunlight, and several intermediate versions, trace the evolution of his approach to this theme over nearly two decades. Each version moves further from narrative specificity toward aesthetic idealization, until in the final Port Sunlight version the Annunciation is almost entirely stripped of its narrative context -- no lily, no book, no architectural setting that roots it in a specific historical moment -- and becomes an encounter between two luminous beings whose beauty is itself the medium of divine communication. The absence of drama is the point: the Incarnation is not a crisis but a completion, not a disruption but a revelation of what has always been true.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery context of the main version is itself historically significant. William Hesketh Lever built Port Sunlight as a model village for his soap factory workers, and the Lady Lever Gallery -- opened in 1922 as a memorial to his wife -- was designed to provide the working community with access to fine art as part of the social vision that animated the entire village. The Burne-Jones Annunciation, hung in this context, was not merely a religious image for a church or private devotional use but a work of art made available to a working-class community as part of a progressive social vision -- a secularized version of the medieval belief that beautiful sacred art is owed to all people, not just to the wealthy.
Visiting Info
The 1879 Annunciation is displayed at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral, near Liverpool. The Lady Lever contains one of the finest collections of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Movement painting in England, assembled by William Lever (Lord Leverhulme). The gallery is free to enter and is part of the National Museums Liverpool network. Port Sunlight is 30 minutes by train from Liverpool Central. Birmingham Museums Trust holds a related version and significant other Burne-Jones works.