Edward Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham on this day in 1833. Start with the hands. In the tall painting below, a procession of barefoot young women comes down a curving stone stair, and nearly every hand is busy — a trumpet held at the lip, fingers laid along a pipe, cymbals lifted, a violin steadied. Long hands, weightless. Nobody grips. They hold instruments the way you hold something asleep. The doves on the tiled roof above are doing more work than the arms are.

He did not stay inside frames. Much of his drawing went out into glass and thread, to Morris & Co., where the design is only the beginning of the object. Look at the window below: three tiers behind iron bars, an enthroned king in red passing a scroll, angels with harps, soldiers in gold. Somebody chose those pot-metal reds and cut them, somebody painted the folds in brown enamel and fired them, somebody leaded it and puttied it and got it up into a wall. In the lowest tier there are seated figures working over open boxes of stones and vessels — craftsmen, drawn by a man whose designs depended entirely on craftsmen. The small panel at the lower right remembers George Minot Dexter, 1800-1872.

Burne-Jones died in 1898. The cartoons are his. The colour in the light, at four in the afternoon, belongs to the glaziers.