Two studies of male nudes for 'The Car of Love'

The Car of Love (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) was conceived in 1872 as a lifesize composition, one of several which, as Burne-Jones wrote in his work-record, 'above all other I desire to paint and count my chief designs for some years to come'. The picture was still unfinished when he died suddenly in June 1898, filling an entire end wall of the studio he built at the bottom of the garden at The Grange, his house in Fulham (see S. Wildman and J. Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, 1998, p. 148, fig. 83). The composition, based on one of the 'Triumphs' of Petrarch, shows Cupid being pulled down a city street by a crowd of happy or despondent lovers. One of the present drawings may be a study for the figure second from the right in the second row back in the picture. The other is undoubtedly for the figure on the extreme right of the third row back. Both probably date from the early 1890s.