The Last Pre-Raphaelite by Fiona MacCarthy

The Last Pre-Raphaelite:

(Faber, £25)

. He hated to see a fat woman as much as he hated an undecorated surface.

The fever for beauty had come upon him years before when, as a Brummie schoolboy called Ted Jones, he went up to Oxford and was gripped by visions of "the old days gay knights and ladies by the river bank, and all the pageantry of the golden age". He lost patience with home thereafter, disowning "bearish, boiler-bursting, beggarly, black Birmm" and everything connected with it.

Jones's interest in art and aesthetics might have remained visionary if he hadn't made friends at Oxford with William Morris, who, like Jones, was expecting to join the Church. They planned to start a small religious community together but on a walking holiday converted the brotherhood idea into one about artists, and before they left the university had decorated the Oxford Union with lush pre-Raphaelite designs, met Ruskin and Rossetti and had plans to start an art magazine.

By 1861, they were the linchpins of The Firm, the bespoke interior decorating team whose painted panels, lacquered furniture and medievally inspired tapestries were soon adorning the homes of a select, arty few.

As Fiona MacCarthy tells us in her fine new biography, there was a certain goggle-eyed relish to Burne-Jones's enjoyment of the patronage that came his way almost from the start. He and Morris were taken up by the Little Holland House set and were at the heart of "advanced" London society.

Ruskin supported his work with commissions and lavish handouts, Watts and Swinburne and Rossetti were his friends, great houses opened for him and upper-class "stunners" lined up to become his models. They appeared, tastefully draped and languidly posed, in his depictions of classical and mythological subjects like peas out of exactly the same golden pod, immediately recognisable as "the Burne-Jones type".

The lavish plate sections of this book bear witness to the artist's obsession with this look (and the photographs show how much it was a product of his imagination). He stuck with it all his life, producing hundreds of panels and paintings and tapestries and pieces of furniture covered with his trademark pouty ladies; "Elgin marbles with dark eyes," as Ruskin called them. As decorative motifs, they have instant allure, but are they Art? Even a portrait such as that of the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco - executed at the height of the artist's infatuation with her - seems oddly devoid of emotional content.

One of the rivets in Burne-Jones's friendship with Ruskin was their mutual interest in young girls, the "pets" that both men liked to collect around them. Fiona MacCarthy moves carefully across this minefield and, in her interpretation, Burne-Jones seems no more creepy than most of his male friends in that girl-worshipping age. His marriage to Georgiana Macdonald, who was 15 when he proposed, modulated from initial delight to "irritated fondness", in MacCarthy's nice phrase, surviving Burne-Jones's endless crushes on his friends' daughters and his one serious extramarital affair.

It's remarkable that MacCarthy makes Burne-Jones's sensitivity more impressive than his follies; also that she allows him a sort of privacy in the centre of this fat, fact-packed book. He wasn't a wit and he wasn't a genius, but his devotion to work and to a "beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be" was endearingly stubborn: "The more materialistic science becomes," he said, "the more angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul."

Burne-Jones's fanciful knights and ladies have never gone out of fashion. The Great War stimulated a lively market for memorial windows that adapted many of his old designs; as a result, his style is probably better represented in our public buildings than that of any other British artist. Latterday fans have included John Betjeman and Yves Saint Laurent; Andrew Lloyd Webber began buying in the Sixties and has the largest collection of Burne-Jones works in the world, and the tapestry The Quest for the Holy Grail is now in the possession of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page.

An interesting fate for the shy Brummie who craved "big things to do, and vast spaces, and for common people to see them and say Oh! - only Oh!"