Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., A.R.A. 1833-1898

Thomas Agnew & Sons, London;
Christie’s, London;
Private collection;
Galerie Arnoldi-Livie, Munich;
Private collection

The present picture is connected with Burne-Jones’s various projects deriving from his interest in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, for which he designed schemes for embroideries and stained glass in 1863-4. The poem, which consists of a Prologue in which the sleeping poet-narrator is rebuked by the god of love for all he had previously written in dispraise of women. In response, Chaucer promises to write a work which will describe all feminine virtues, taking a series of heroines as examples each one of whom has been famed for her fidelity in love. In Greek mythology Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos who, having fallen in love with Theseus, provided him with the thread by which he was able to find his way through the Labyrinth and thus achieve his purpose of both killing the Minotaur and escaping again. Theseus took Ariadne with him to the island of Naxos, but abandoned her there. In Burne-Jones’s gouache Ariadne is shown holding the ball of magic thread and with a length of it between her two hands. The Legend of Good Women, with Ariadne as one of the nine heroines, was also familiar to Victorian readers from Tennyson’s retelling of the legend, as ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, published in his Poems of 1833.

William Morris and Burne-Jones made tapestries showing ‘virtuous women’, loosely based on the Chaucerian theme, for the Red House in 1860-61. In the autumn of 1863 Burne-Jones drew a series of fourteen or fifteen figures of such female types, which were intended to be worked up as embroideries, commissioned by John Ruskin and to be made by the pupils at Winnington Hall School. For whatever reason, and notwithstanding the enthusiasm for the project that was felt at Winnington, as reported by Burne-Jones (see G.B.-J., Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, two volumes, 1904, I, pp.266-73, 276), the project was never carried out. The best notion of Burne-Jones’s intention for this scheme is provided by a sketch, now in the collection of Birmingham City Art Gallery in which each of the intended figures is shown standing against a fence upon which roses are growing (see Burne-Jones, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 1986, cat. no.87, repr. p.199). In this drawing, presumably dating from 1863, the figure of Ariadne appears in the lower register, more or less as we see her in the present gouache. Her name appears in a decorative cartouche, while above her figure is written ‘Amy’, the name of the Winnington pupil who was to be asked to make the corresponding embroidery. It is possible that the present gouache was painted to provide a closer idea of how the figure should look, and in colour. Burne-Jones may have made it to show to Ruskin, to be sure that he was satisfied with the scheme as it was being devised, or to send to Amy to assist her in her work on the envisaged embroidery. No other expanded and coloured versions of the figures are known, presumably because the project was abandoned before Burne-Jones began to draw them.

A further set of designs of seven figures based on the Chaucerian theme were made for the watercolourist Myles Birket Foster, to provide stained glass for his house The Hill at Witley in Surrey. These were completed in January 1864, but the windows themselves are dispersed or destroyed. A second series, but consisting of only six figures, was made for Peterhouse, Cambridge. The studies for these figures, rather different in stance and physical appearance to that seen in the present gouache, are in the collection of Birmingham City Art Gallery (see A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, two volumes, 1974, I, repr.200-03). In the design, as in the Peterhouse window, Ariadne is seen paired with Lucretia.
CSN