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

Provenance

Judge Frederick Clements of Canterbury
His nephew
His Stepson, Kay Hammond
Private collection

Condition

In an early Italian frame

Description / Expertise

This tiny painting is among Burne-Jones’s first works in oil. It was painted around 1861 and has the reddish brown tonality of his watercolours of this time such as Clark Saunders (Tate Gallery), Girl and Goldfish (Carlisle Art Gallery) and Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund (Mellon Centre, Newhaven). The work also shows the facial type with wide-set eyes, which Burne-Jones preferred, in the early 1860’s. The frame is 17th century Italian. It is possible that this was a souvenir of Burne-Jones’s first Italian visit in 1859 and that the present work was painted for it.

This is a painting from the first phase of the classical revival of the 1860’s, when artists in the circle of Burne-Jones and Rossetti treated classical subjects in medieval guise. It can be linked to such works as Rossetti’s pen-and-ink drawing Cassandra (1861 British Museum) and William Morris’s unfinished cycle of poems, Scenes from the Fall of Troy, projected between 1857 and 1861. In this Troy is to his imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres: spired and gabled, red roofed. In Burne Jones’s oeuvre it can be linked with such works as Theseus and Ariadne (1861-2 Private collection), where a classical legend is depicted in a dark medieval style.