The love song

Burne-Jones, Edward (1833-1898)

Item type:

painting

Date of creation:

1868-1877

Height:

114.3 cm  (45 in.)

Width:

155.9 cm  (61 3/8 in.)

Technique / Medium:

oil on canvas

Description

In the center a woman kneeling and playing positive organ; a figure (probably an angel) working bellows behind the instrument; on the left side a young man in armor sitting and listening to the music.
Burne-Jones associated this painting with a refrain from a Breton folk ballad: "Alas, I know a love song, / Sad or happy, each in turn." Drawing inspiration from the gothicizing Pre-Raphaelite movement, the artist conjured a twilight scene with a richly romantic, medieval air, enhanced by allusions to Italian Renaissance art, from the warm, dewy colors to the gracious figures and original frame, which recalls sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century Venetian designs. When the picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1878, the novelist Henry James admiringly compared it to "some mellow Giorgione or some richly-glowing Titian."

Instruments [MIMO Code] (notes)

Positive organ [2268]

RIdIM images

Image URLs

image link 1

RIdIM record id

3810