★★★★☆
It has a cumulative effect, this exhibition. By the final room, I was laughing out loud (it was the piano hand-painted with evil-looking cherubim that finished me off). Don’t get me wrong, it is a serious show — the first in the UK to be dedicated to the influential artist Edward Burne-Jones for 20 years. It’s just that the painter’s high-camp exuberance eventually gets the better of you and you start losing the plot.
Curators take a loosely chronological approach, exploring different aspects of Burne-Jones’s practice. One room is dedicated to his often excellent draughtsmanship. Look out for a group of four female head studies, of which the fourth, Desiderium, is particularly breathtaking (although I couldn’t help noticing elsewhere the trouble he took