Detail of The Love Song by Burne-Jones in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2008

Artist
Sir Edward Burne-Jones (English, 1833–1898)

Title
The Love Song

Date
1868–77

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
45 x 61 3/8 in. (114.3 x 155.9 cm)

Credit Line
The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1947

Accession Number
47.26

In 1846, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member of the circle of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nine years later he assembled a group of seven friends to help him decorate the Oxford Union Building with scenes from Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." One of the driving forces of this "second Brotherhood" was Edward Burne-Jones. His "Love Song," with its figures reminiscent of the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio and its "Arthurian" landscape bathed in evening light, reflects the profound influence of both the Italian Renaissance and the gothicizing Pre-Raphaelite movement.

This painting is the definitive version of several works that Burne-Jones based on a refrain from an old Breton song: "Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour, / Triste ou gai, tour à tour" (Alas, I know a love song, / Sad or happy, each in turn).

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/europe...