This tile, designed by Edward Burne-Jones and painted by Lucy Faulkner, shows Alceste, a character found in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Goode Wimmen’. Tiles were a popular and financially important aspect of Morris and Co.’s early output and were often influenced by medieval and Renaissance sources. Despite Morris’s belief that works of art should, as far as possible, be designed and executed by a single craftsperson, the tiles created by Morris & Co. were part of a more complex chain of production: blank tiles were purchased from the Netherlands and were then painted by members of Morris’s workshop (including regularly by sisters Lucy and Kate Faulkner) to designs by Morris, Burne-Jones and others.
This depiction of Alceste is one of a series of designs based on ‘Legend of Goode Wimmen’ and is typical of Burne-Jones’s use of combining ceramic tiles in the creation of pictorial decoration.
