SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES BT ARA (1833-1898) Biography
PRE-RAPHAELITE (founded 1848) Biography

Literature

Martin Harrison & Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, Barrie & Jenkins, London 1973, page 96

Exhibition History

Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, November 1-26, 1969

Description / Expertise

'I am sure that her love is all to her', wrote Rossetti of Maria Zambaco in 1870, the year before this picture was painted with Maria as the model for Venus. 'She is really extremely beautiful when one gets to study her face. I think she has got much more so in the last year with all her love and trouble.' For Burne-Jones to paint Maria as Venus, the goddess of love, was an obvious tribute to her beauty, but there is also a more covert reference to his love for her, and to her unhappiness. The title refers to the wedding of Venus, who in Greek mythology was unsuitably married to Vulcan and later fell in love with Mars. Maria also had made an incongruous marriage and later fell passionately in love with Burne-Jones. In spite of his love for her, the relationship brought her intense suffering before ending in 1872. Maria leans on a plinth, which supports a blindfolded Cupid, a reference to Maria as the victim of love. She is alone and pensively aloof from the preparations for her wedding, which are being carried out in the background.

There are two versions of this painting. The first was a present for Maria Spartali on the occasion of her wedding to the American journalist, W J Stillman. It is now in the Fogg Art Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like Maria Zambaco, Spartali was one of the wealthy close-knit Greek communities in London. Both women were renowned for their beauty and, with Aglaia Coronio, Maria’s cousin, were known as the ‘The Three Graces’.

This painting is the second version, which was carefully underdrawn by Burne-Jones’s Studio assistant, Charles Fairfax Murray, and then finished by the Master, which was the usual practice in the studio.