Echoes of the Past: Property from an Important Private Collection

Provenance:

L.G. Duke

Mathias Komor, New York

Sotheby's, New York, sale of January 29, 2010, lot 923.

Lot Essay:

A passionate draughtsman, Burne-Jones produced a large number of sketches and kept many of these in his studio until his death. The repetition of the study of the hand to the right of the present drawing suggests that it was likely intended as a working sketch, as does the inscription along the top edge, ‘Angel with King’ presumably a reference to the title or subject of the final composition.

While the gesture of a hand touching the face is a recurring motif in Burne-Jones’s paintings, the present work seems closer in spirit to the angel standing at the foot of King Arthur’s bed in The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, a colossal

painting now in Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, and considered to be the artist’s final masterpiece on which he worked for twenty years. Central to the composition, near the end of the bed, is a female figure standing next to a column. The figure appears in reverse in the present drawing; however, she holds her hand to her mouth in the gesture of silence, and has the same quality of stillness.

In comparison to the precise, highly refined drawings of the 1870s, in this late period, Burne-Jones’s drawing technique becomes softer, the chalk is more broadly swept, and stumping is used for areas of modeling. Further elegant, columnar figures, similar to this almost ethereal angel, inhabit other of the artist's last works. The writer Henry James described these works as "pictured abstraction."