(b Worcester, 7 Sept 1760; d London, 16 Dec 1848). English painter and illustrator. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, London, from 1777. The work of James Barry and Henry Fuseli was an influence on his style, which often strained unsuccessfully towards heroic effects, but a more mundane technical proficiency was gained from copying portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. There are several accomplished versions of Reynolds’s 1781 portrait of Dr Charles Burney, Edward’s uncle (e.g. Oxford, Ashmolean), and the best of his few original portraits depicts his cousin, the novelist Fanny Burney (1782; London, N.P.G.). Burney’s first exhibited works were three drawings of scenes from Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (exh. RA 1780; untraced), and his literary connections may have encouraged his work as an illustrator. Nevertheless, he had dreams of working on a larger scale and made sketches for a St Paul at Ephesus (c. 1800; New Haven, CT, Yale U., A.G.) in the manner of the Raphael Cartoons (London, V&A). Burney’s early drawings, such as the watercolour (1782; London, BM) of Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon (a miniature theatre with light effects and translucent screens giving an impression of motion), are quaint, nervous and spiky but, perhaps assisted by extensive copying at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, his technique became seductively curvilinear and extremely sophisticated. His sketchbooks of 1780–84 are in the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

• Burney, Edward Francesco