The story
In 1875 the politician Arthur Balfour, later a British prime minister, asked the painter Edward Burne-Jones to fill his London music room with the story of Perseus, the Greek hero sent to kill the Gorgon Medusa. Burne-Jones worked on it for ten years and never quite finished the oils, but he made ten full-size studies in gouache to plan every figure.
Those ten large cartoons are the pride of Southampton City Art Gallery, glowing sequences of armour, wings and stone-still victims from the height of the Pre-Raphaelite world. The gallery, opened in 1939, has spent its buying power well beyond them, with strong British twentieth-century painting and a good run of European art.
For a civic gallery in a port city, it also collects boldly modern work, so a room of contemporary British painting can sit a short walk from Burne-Jones's mythological knight.
