ベツレヘムの星

Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham, and in 1887 the city asked its famous son for a picture to hang in the new museum and art gallery it was building. What he delivered three years later was enormous: a watercolour nearly 13 feet across, worked on ten sheets of the largest paper then sold, laid down onto canvas. He painted it standing on a ladder and grumbled in a letter about climbing up and down his steps all day. The scene is the three kings, Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar, arriving before Mary and the child, an angel in the centre holding out the star. For all the gold and the crowns, it is watercolour throughout, still the largest of its century.