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Lot Essay
The 'MHG' to whom this drawing is dedicated is certainly Helen Mary (May) Gaskell (1853-1940), the last and, with the possible exception of her friend Frances Horner, most important of the young women with whom Burne-Jones formed romantic but platonic relationships in later life. The daughter of the Rev. David Melville, a canon of Worcester Cathedral, she met the artist through Frances Horner in the early 1890s, and despite their difference in age, Burne-Jones being twenty years May's senior, they were soon on intimate terms, with May sharing Burne-Jones's artistic and literary interests. Burne-Jones would often write to May as many as five times a day.
May was the mistress of a large London house at Marble Arch (on the site of the present Cumberland Hotel) and had two houses in the country. She also had three children, of whom the oldest, Amy, was the subject of one of Burne-Jones's most haunting portraits, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894 (Lloyd Webber Collection). Her relationship with Burne-Jones, though long known in outline to students of the artist, was analysed in detail by her great-granddaughter Josceline Dimbleby in A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne-Jones.
Colin Cruise has suggested that in the present drawing the figure of the angel is in fact that of May, as there are distinct similarities with a drawn portrait of her from the same year also with the monogram 'MHG'. As such the melancholy figure of love, distanced from the viewer by the window, and made in the last year of Burne-Jones's life, has an intensely personal romanticism referencing the artist's intimate relationship with the sitter. He wrote to May, “I do love you with my whole soul and life - I want your face to be the last sight my eyes will look upon - nay it doesn't matter so much for that - the thought of you will be my last waking thought.” (J. Dimbleby, loc. cit., p. 216).
May was the mistress of a large London house at Marble Arch (on the site of the present Cumberland Hotel) and had two houses in the country. She also had three children, of whom the oldest, Amy, was the subject of one of Burne-Jones's most haunting portraits, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894 (Lloyd Webber Collection). Her relationship with Burne-Jones, though long known in outline to students of the artist, was analysed in detail by her great-granddaughter Josceline Dimbleby in A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne-Jones.
Colin Cruise has suggested that in the present drawing the figure of the angel is in fact that of May, as there are distinct similarities with a drawn portrait of her from the same year also with the monogram 'MHG'. As such the melancholy figure of love, distanced from the viewer by the window, and made in the last year of Burne-Jones's life, has an intensely personal romanticism referencing the artist's intimate relationship with the sitter. He wrote to May, “I do love you with my whole soul and life - I want your face to be the last sight my eyes will look upon - nay it doesn't matter so much for that - the thought of you will be my last waking thought.” (J. Dimbleby, loc. cit., p. 216).