Saint Philip Baptising the Eunuch

Sir Edward Burne-Jones · 1853/98

Medium

Graphite and charcoal, with brush and black ink and traces of brush and brown gouache on cream wove paper, laid down on cream board

Original size

81.3 × 47.8 cm (32 1/16 × 18 7/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

This monumental preparatory drawing reveals Burne-Jones at his most searching — a quiet, gravity-laden scene of conversion rendered with the precision and weight of a finished work. Edward Burne-Jones was the defining figure of the later Pre-Raphaelite movement, bridging Victorian sentiment and the emerging Aesthetic tradition. His figures are characteristically elongated and still, drawn from Renaissance and Byzantine sources, and this work shows his mastery of tonal draftsmanship — layering graphite, charcoal, and ink to build a surface that shimmers like cloth. The composition dates from across a long span of his career, suggesting he returned to it repeatedly, refining its meditative tension. The subject — taken from Acts 8 — depicts Philip baptising the Ethiopian eunuch, one of the earliest recorded conversions in Christian scripture, a moment Burne-Jones treats not with drama but with a solemn, almost suspended reverence. Because the original is a work on paper, never translated into oil by Burne-Jones himself, this hand-painted reproduction offers something genuinely new: the scene rendered in the rich, layered medium his larger canvases employed, giving it a warmth and depth that honours both the drawing's intent and the full weight of his artistic vision.