|
back
8
FLYING FIGURE c.1870
SIR
EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, Bt.
1833-1898
Oil,
blue and white, on canvas, 50.8 x 34.3 (20 x 13.5)
Provenance:
unknown.
Exhibited:
Fulham 1967 (9); Fulham 1983 (2).
A
floating upright figure with elaborate, swirling drapery,
facing right with right arm extended, against a blue and white
background.
David
Gould, in his 1954 catalogue of the collection, states that
the painting is a study for Flora, c.1869-84, which
was in the Ionides collection, the present whereabouts are
unknown to the compiler.
Harrison
and Waters draw attention (p.87) to several drawings of flying
girls, including one of Two Flying Female Figures (24.1
x 20.3) in the National Museum of Wales (wrongly located by
them in Birmingham), which Burne-Jones executed c.1869-72.
These seem to be related to a group of allegorical paintings
including this picture, traditionally called The Sower, which
is almost certainly a later incorrect title based solely on
the pose of the figure.
The
best known of these allegories is Hesperus, The
Evening Star, 1870, (78.74 x 55.9), illustrated by Harrison
and Waters (col.pl. 28, opp. p.113), in a private collection
in 1989, which shows a floating, draped female figure above
a coastal town. When exhibited at the Old Water Colour Society
in 1870 it was described by the critic Sidney Colvin as "an
embodied soul floating in the cool blue-glimmering twilight."
Burne-Jones
may possibly have been inspired by the allegories of his friend
G.F.Watts whom he had known from the late 1850s and whose
work he continued to admire. It was Watts who encouraged him
to visit Italy in 1859 where he studied, among other Renaissance
paintings, the works of Botticelli, a major if distant influence
on the figure in this painting.
However,
despite obvious Italianate elements, the prototype for the
single hovering figure, above a city, may well be Durer's
engraving, the Large Nemesis, c.1500. Morris and Burne-Jones
had discovered the work of Durer when undergraduates at Oxford
and, to his great delight, John Ruskin gave him a number of
Durer engravings and woodcuts in
back |
