Love

This attractive watercolour, probably dating from about 1880, is related to a large design for an embroidery representing Love as visualised by Dante in the Divine Comedy (Victoria & Albert Museum; see Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, and Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1998-9, cat. p. 280, no. 130, illustrated). In the full-scale version, also executed in watercolour, the words 'L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle' (Love that moves the sun and other stars), the last line of the Paradiso, are inscribed above. The design was made for Burne-Jones's confidante Frances Horner, and her needlework version, which was shown at the Fifth Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1896, is in the church at Mells, Somerset, where she lived following her marriage to Sir John Horner, a barrister and landed gentleman, in 1883. A full-scale cartoon in pencil was sold in these Rooms on 29 October 1985, lot 182, and Stephen Wildman, cataloguing the V&A version in 1998, suggested that it too was painted over a cartoon. Whatever its origins, it is a spectacular work, highly finished and brilliantly coloured.

The present drawing is presumably a preliminary study for the large design since it differs from it in many respects. The large version, for example, not only includes the inscription but shows Love holding a bow rather than a flaming heart, while eight children, not three, shelter beneath his wings. No doubt Burne-Jones gave the drawing to Frances Horner, who was the recipient of many such presents. The daughter of his patron William Graham, she was the most valued of the young women with whom he formed relationships in later life, essentially platonic, based on shared aesthetic and intellectual tastes, but with a romantic dimension too. The fact that Frances was a leading 'Soul' had a profound bearing on his ascendancy within that high-minded aristocratic clique.