Lot Essay
The story of The Forge of Cupid comes from Geoffrey Chaucer's thirteenth-century poem Parlement of Foules, depicting the moment when the narrator comes across Cupid forging his arrows by a well, while his daughter, Will, tempers and finishes them beside him:
Under a tree beside a welle I sey
Cupide our lorde his arrowes forge and file:
And at his feete his bowe already lay;
And wel his daughter tempred, at the while,
The hiddes in the welle; and with her wile
She couched hem after, as they should serve
Same to slee, and some to wound and kerve.
Burne-Jones read many of the works of Chaucer as a student at Oxford, and he returned to the stories for inspiration over the years, including for the group of works relating to the Romaunt of the Rose, a subject which occupied him from 1860 until his death. He would later provide the wood-cut illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer, published by William Morris in 1896. Clifford was heavily influenced by Burne-Jones and copied several of his works, largely in the 1860s, including some commissioned by Burne-Jones himself. Alongside Robert Bateman, Walter Crane and others, he was part of a group of followers of Burne-Jones who exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in the late 1860s and 1870s.
Under a tree beside a welle I sey
Cupide our lorde his arrowes forge and file:
And at his feete his bowe already lay;
And wel his daughter tempred, at the while,
The hiddes in the welle; and with her wile
She couched hem after, as they should serve
Same to slee, and some to wound and kerve.
Burne-Jones read many of the works of Chaucer as a student at Oxford, and he returned to the stories for inspiration over the years, including for the group of works relating to the Romaunt of the Rose, a subject which occupied him from 1860 until his death. He would later provide the wood-cut illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer, published by William Morris in 1896. Clifford was heavily influenced by Burne-Jones and copied several of his works, largely in the 1860s, including some commissioned by Burne-Jones himself. Alongside Robert Bateman, Walter Crane and others, he was part of a group of followers of Burne-Jones who exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in the late 1860s and 1870s.