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Lot Essay
The concept of The Sirens dates from 1870, when Burne-Jones’s work record states, ‘Designed the triptych of Troy and the Sirens and began the oil picture of the Mill, and made studies for the Hours, & Pygmalion.’ In his record for 1872, Burne-Jones refers again to the subject as one ‘which above all others I desire to paint,’ but he did not begin to work on it in earnest until 1891.
As Harrison and Waters point out, in common with two of his great narrative works (the Briar Rose series and The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon), Burne-Jones chooses to depict the moment just before the action (op. cit., p. 153). There is a sense of a stillness about to be shattered, with the eerie blue-green light and anxious side-long glances of the figures suggesting impending disaster. The empty foreground allows us to imagine the ship lured further in to the shore.
This suggestion and ambiguity of action was entirely intentional: Burne-Jones wrote to his great patron Frederick Leyland in 1891, when he was returning to the composition, ‘It is a sort of Siren-land – I don’t know when or where – not Greek sirens but any sirens anywhere, that lead men on to destruction. There will be a shore full of them, looking out from rocks, and crannies in the rocks, at a boat full of armed men, and the time will be sunset. The men shall look at the women and the women at the men but what happens afterwards is more than I care to tell’ (G. Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, II, p. 222).
He never completed a finished painting, but made several composition studies – the present work in pastel and another of the same size in the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, a smaller and somewhat schematic watercolor and bodycolor with nude figures (sold Sotheby’s, London, 3 November 2003, lot 201), and two large oil sketches (Ringling Museum, Sarasota and Geneva Museum).
As Harrison and Waters point out, in common with two of his great narrative works (the Briar Rose series and The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon), Burne-Jones chooses to depict the moment just before the action (op. cit., p. 153). There is a sense of a stillness about to be shattered, with the eerie blue-green light and anxious side-long glances of the figures suggesting impending disaster. The empty foreground allows us to imagine the ship lured further in to the shore.
This suggestion and ambiguity of action was entirely intentional: Burne-Jones wrote to his great patron Frederick Leyland in 1891, when he was returning to the composition, ‘It is a sort of Siren-land – I don’t know when or where – not Greek sirens but any sirens anywhere, that lead men on to destruction. There will be a shore full of them, looking out from rocks, and crannies in the rocks, at a boat full of armed men, and the time will be sunset. The men shall look at the women and the women at the men but what happens afterwards is more than I care to tell’ (G. Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1904, II, p. 222).
He never completed a finished painting, but made several composition studies – the present work in pastel and another of the same size in the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, a smaller and somewhat schematic watercolor and bodycolor with nude figures (sold Sotheby’s, London, 3 November 2003, lot 201), and two large oil sketches (Ringling Museum, Sarasota and Geneva Museum).