Lot 146: SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, BT., A.R.A. (1833-1898) GIRLS IN A MEADOW

oil on panel 26 by 114.5 cm.; 10 by 45 in. Burne-Jones conceived this figurative compostion as a decorative panel for the front of an upright piano made for his friend the painter George Price Boyce. In 1860 Boyce had bought from Burne-Jones an ink drawing related to a decoration that Burne-Jones was then making for a piano of his own, showing a group of eight female figures listening to music in a garden while the figure of Death approaches at a gateway. This purchase seems to have prompted Boyce to order a similar piano, and to ask Burne-Jones to decorate it for him. In December 1860, Boyce recorded in his diary that he had asked the piano-maker Eavestaff to supply a panel for Burne-Jones to paint on. However, it seems a confusion occurred over the exact size of the panel needed, because on 28 January 1861 Boyce wrote in his dairy: "To Roberson's to alter dimensions of panel for piano", while on 19 February a further entry describes how he "Took to Jones the prepared panel for my new pianoforte. Webb came in also." (These entries come from previously unpublished parts of G.P. Boyce's diary, the MS of which is in a private collection.) The scheme of decoration devised for Boyce's piano, known previously from a pencil study of the four left-hand figures, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (see Morris & Company in Cambridge, exhibition catalogue, 1980, (17), pl.11), consists of six figures sitting and lying while one of their number reads from a large book. On the right side an open landscape is given, while on the left the figures are enclosed by awnings through which evening light shines. Boyce took delivery of the piano, complete with Burne-Jones's painted decoration, and it may be seen in a photograph of the studio of his house in Glebe Place, Chelsea in Architectural Review, 1898-9, vol.V, p.151. The piano was apparently taken to the United States shortly after the sale of the contents of West House in 1897, and is now untraced. The present painting is likely to be a sketch for the finished panel for Boyce's piano, or perhaps was a first attempt at the subject abandoned by Burne-Jones in January 1861 as a consequence of the muddle about the size of panel needed. This is an important rediscovery from a crucial formative stage of Burne-Jones's career. It provides a fascination insight into the way the artist was thinking about how painted subjects and decoration might be combined, and how works of art might thus gain a particular relevance to people using the pieces of furniture for which the painted decorations were made. It also tells much about how Burne-Jones was evolving certain pictorial types in this period, and how even apparently subjectless decorative compositions may be imbued with implied symbolical meaning. Burne-Jones's own piano, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, was deliberately made from unstained American mahogany so that he might paint directly on it. On the keyboard lid he had painted a version of the subject "Chant d'Amour". However, the panel which appeared on the front of the piano below the keybord was more sinister, being described by Georgiana Burne-Jones as "Death, veiled and crowned, standing outside the gate of a garden where a number of girls, unconscious of his approach, are resting and listening to music." (G.B.J., Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, two volumes, 1904, I, p.207) The figurative scheme for the first piano originates in sketches that Burne-Jones made from the Trionfo della Morte frescoes in the Camposanto in Pisa in 1859. The decoration of Boyce's piano is really very similar, except that Burne-Jones here omitted the figure of Death, and by doing so he seems to embrace the principle that art should avoid a merely illustrative purpose, prefering to give an idyllic character to the arrangements of figurative elements within a protoclassical composition. This artistic preoccupation reaches its conclusion in Burne-Jones's celebrated watercolour Green Summer (ex Sotheby's, 19 June 1990, lot 32), of 1864, where once again female figures are absorbed by the words of a reader, and which is concerned with the evocation of mood rather than the transmission of narrative. However, the strange and haunting quality of each of these closely related images clearly originates in Burne-Jones's response to the implicit intimation of mortality in the Trionfo della Morte frescoes, and as such each may be read as essays on the transitory nature of worldly happiness.