work in this genre is Sanctuary (RA, 1867), the snappy modern title for Edward IV Withheld by Ecclesiastics from Pursuing Lancastrian Fugitives into a Church, in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, showing an incident after the Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, during the Wars of the Roses. William Bell Scott has an anecdote of Burchett, who "had chosen the subject as a glorious example of the power of the Church and the faith of the prince at that blessed period in Merry England" failing to sell the painting to an "extreme Radical" shipping magnate: ""I admire the picture, Mr. Burchett, it is excellently painted, and I like it for its subject; these men in full armour won't go in, they won't end the day completely after risking all their lives, because of that old priest with the jack-in-the-box! Superstition, you see, turns them into caitiffs!" This knocked over poor Burchett so much, the transaction came to nothing" Scott comments that Burchett: "gave himself up to historical painting on a rather large scale, just the kind of art which English taste and the R. Academy as the mediocre exponent of the same would like to crush out of existence". However the work which has attracted the most attention and praise from critics in recent decades is what appears to be his "only known landscape", View across Sandown Bay, Isle of Wight probably of 1855, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, who describe it as a "minor masterpiece". This small painting, which more closely approaches a Pre-Raphaelite landscape style, shows a half-harvested cornfield, with tools and jugs of the farm-workers piled up beside a corn stook. But the only figures visible are two clearly middle-class women, no doubt part of the same party as the artist, one sitting against a stook reading a book, and the other walking with a parasol. Any georgic or realist focus on agriculture is absent "his cornfield is just part of a landscape where middle-class people take their leisure. The corn is no more or no less useful than the beaches which we imagine to be in the distance of this brilliantly coloured painting". Here too a more subtle hint of religious feeling is found: "the church in the distance hints at the source of the bounty represented by the partially garnered harvest in the foreground fields". Treatments of the almost identical view by William Dyce and