born Aug. 28, 1833, Birmingham, Eng.
died June 17, 1898, London
British painter, illustrator, and designer.
At Oxford he met his future collaborator, Dante Gabriel Rossetti . His paintings portray the romantic medieval imagery favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites , and he drew inspiration from the elongated, melancholy figures of {{link=Lippi, Fra Filippo">Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli . He first achieved great success in 1877 with an exhibition of paintings including The Beguiling of Merlin (1873–77). He was a founding member of Morris & Co. (1861), notably as a designer of stained glass and tapestries, and he executed 87 designs for the Kelmscott Press edition of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896), considered one the world's finest printed books. His work had great influence on the French Symbolist movement, and his revival of the ideal of the artist-craftsman influenced the development of 20th-century industrial design.