A study for Sir Ewain in the Holy Grail Tapestries

This drawing is a study for one of the Holy Grail tapestries that Edward Burne-Jones designed for Morris & Co in the early 1890s. The tapestries illustrate the Quest for the Holy Grail as told in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a book that Burne-Jones and Morris had discovered when undergraduates together at Oxford, and the subject of the famous murals in the Oxford Union that they helped to paint under the careful guidance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The Holy Grail tapestries are one of the outstanding achievements of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the climax of Burne-Jones and Morris’s collaboration in decorative design. The original set were commissioned from Morris & Co by the Australian mining engineer William Knox D'Arcy, and were completed in 1894, decorating his dining room at Stanmore Hall in Middlesex.

Burne-Jones often copied examples of tapestry from the South Kensington Museum in early sketchbooks so there was a clear pre-existing interest in the craft. When creating the designs for these tapestries, Burne-Jones compartmentalised his task by making experimental compositional drawings and detailed studies of individual figures, such as this example of Sir Ewain. When the designs had been finalised, the drawings were enlarged photographically by Morris’s friend Emery Walker to make cartoons for the weavers to work from. A study for the figure of Sir Ewain comes from the third of the tapestries, The Failure of Sir Gawain and Sir Ewain to achieve the Holy Grail (fig. 1,1893-95, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). Malory’s text details 'how Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine went their ways to seek the Sangreal but might no wise attain to the sight of it but were brought to shame because of the evil life they led aforetime.' In the finished tapestry the knight holds a shield in his left hand which contains a heraldic device, identifying him as Ewain.