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13
STUDY of a MAN'S HEAD for THE GARDEN OF PAN
1880-86
SIR
EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, Bt.
1833-1898
Black,
white and yellow chalk on brown paper, 26 x 25.4 (10.25 x
10)
Provenance:
unknown.
Exhibited:
Fulham 1967 (27); Fulham 1983 (3).
A
man's head in profile to the right, leaning towards his left
shoulder.
A
study for the head of the male listener in The Garden of
Pan, 1886-7 (152.5 x 186.7), in the National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, an essay in arcadianism which, according
to his wife Georgiana, Burne-Jones had envisaged painting
as early as 1872, "a picture of the world - with Pan
and Echo and sylvan gods, and a forest full of centaurs and
a wild background of woods, mountains and rivers". (Memorials,
I, p.308). She later described it (Memorials, II, pp.174-5)
as "a fulfilment of part of Edward's intention to paint
the Beginning of the World."
The
completed painting shows two seated naked lovers, at the left,
listening raptly to the piping Pan, seated on rocks, at the
right, above a narrow stream. The figures are set within a
lushly wooded arcadian landscape.
According
to Annette Dixon, in The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle
in the National Gallery of Victoria (1978), three other
oil versions of the painting are recorded. One illustrated
in Robin Ironside and John Gere, Pre-Raphaelite Painters
(1948), pl. 89, (73.7 x 116.8), then in the collection of
The Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, but sold Christie's,
6 June 1958 (98); a preliminary sketch sold Sotheby's, Belgravia,
February 22, 1972 (48) and another in a pri-vate collection
in America. As Gere and Ironside record only the Port Sunlight
and Melbourne versions it seems probable that the painting
in the United States is the one sold from Port Sunlight.
John
Christian, (Arts Council catalogue, 1975), suggests that Piero
di Cosimo was the initial influence but that the final painting
is closer to Dosso Dossi whose work he could have seen in
the collection of his patron, William Graham. Certainly Italian
Renaissance sources are evident, if unspecific, the figure
of the piping Pan is reminiscent of Perugino's Apollo and
Marsyas, which Burne-Jones could have seen in the Louvre
and, perhaps unwittingly, the pose of the male listener's
head echoes that of Adam in Michaelangelo's Sistine
Chapel ceiling.
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