Study for 'The Sirens'

This elegant and very freely handled drawing shows Burne-Jones's later style at its most abstract and mannered. Newly rediscovered, this drawing is the left-hand section of the composition of The Sirens; a drawing of the right-hand section was offered in these Rooms on 6 June 2002, lot 85. That sheet was the same height and used the same paper, and it seems likely that it was originally one large sheet, at some point divided into two.

Burne-Jones first considered The Sirens as the subject for a painting in 1870, referring to it again in his work record in 1872 as a subject 'which above all others I desire to paint', although there is no mention of a first design until 1880, and the painting was not fully under way until about 1891. Now in the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, California, it remained unfinished at his death in 1898.