‘I am Day, I bring again life and glory, love and pain; awake, arise, from death to death, from me the world’s tale quickeneth.’

— William Morris

‘I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be; in a light better than any light that ever shone; in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire; and the forms divinely beautiful.’

— Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Fewer than twenty large oil paintings by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones remain in private hands; almost every other significant canvas from his mature years now hangs in a major institution, among them The Beguiling of Merlin (1874, Lady Lever Art Gallery), Laus Veneris(1878, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne), The Golden Stairs and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1880 and 1884, both Tate), The Wheel of Fortune (1883, Musée d’Orsay) and the valedictory The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico). After the centenary survey Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the Musée d’Orsay in 1998–99, and the first major London retrospective in more than forty years at Tate Britain in 2018–19, a revised consensus firmly places Burne-Jones among the most important British painters of the nineteenth century.

Aurora depicts the Roman goddess of daybreak stepping lightly along a timbered quay, between tall tenements that lean inward across a motionless river. She raises not full-scale cymbals but a pair of small hand-held discs closer to the classical crotala carried by maenads and dancing priestesses on Greek vases and Roman reliefs: an instrument of annunciation, not percussion. In the second before their first bright clash the city sleeps, shutters fast, doors closed, a small vessel moored below. Beyond the rooftops, the deep teal of night is just breaking into a slender band of saffron, the earliest intimation of morning. The figure herself is a column of burnt orange, her gown falling in heavy, sculptural folds that catch against her advancing limbs. One bare foot has already cleared the plank beneath her; the other meets it lightly, weight barely transferred, as though walking were dancing. Her copper hair lifts as if stirred by the air she herself displaces. Time hangs on the threshold between silence and annunciation. Burne-Jones has painted the instant before the day begins.

The quayside is neither wholly real nor wholly imagined. As Georgiana Burne-Jones described in her Memorials of 1904 (Vol. 1, p. 304), her husband had drawn a canal-bridge in a poor quarter of Oxford in 1867, nearly thirty years before this composition took shape around that early sketch. In the original study, a woman stooped to bathe her infant beside the water; here she has been displaced by a goddess, the canal has widened into the arm of a river, and the humble dwellings have metamorphosed into the long warehouses of a wharf, crowned in the distance by a church lifted against the sky.

Georgiana also recalled that, ‘… one day as he was working at “Aurora” he did a very unusual thing, for the humour seized him to think aloud, and he spun out a whole story of the place. “You see the city gets poorer as it gets towards the church,” he said, “which makes it more interesting – the rich people have gone to live further off. It has had many epochs: first the Roman – you may see remnants of that in the foundations: then was an oligarchic government, following on a time of anarchy and disaster, that put up many fine buildings, and some of them still remain. Then came an epoch of trade, capricious and varying in locality, that produced the strangest results on its architecture, one part of the town cutting out another by setting up nearer the sea further down the river, then being driven back again for reasons that can’t be found out now – traces of prosperity and decay succeeding each other.”’ (Georgiana Burne-Jones, op. cit.,p.305)

The model for Auroa is Bessie Keene – her mother Annie had posed for Burne-Jones years earlier for The Golden Stairs (1880, Tate). As the artist Graham Robertson noted; ‘she succeeded her mother as chief ‘angel and ‘nymph’. (Graham Robertson, Time was – The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson, London, 1931, p.282). She is also the model in Vespertina Quies (Evening Repose) (1893, Tate), and likely the model in the later version Love Among the Ruins of 1894 (Bearstead Collection, Wightwick Manor, National Trust). Vespertina Quies is the counterpoint to Aurora, depicting a young woman leaning on a Renaissance balustrade at the close of day - an introspective work reminiscent of da Vinci, in contrast to the graceful movement of Aurora which looks to Botticelli. Taken together the two form a diptych of the day’s extremities: the quiet reflection of evening set against the annunciatory grace of dawn.

The present work is one of two versions of identical dimensions; the first was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1896 and bought by Earl Cowper, and is now in the collection of Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. A photo of Burne-Jones’ studio at The Grange in Kensington shows one of the versions of Aurora in a preliminary state on an easel beside The Marriage of Psyche (1895, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium) and The Arming of Perseus from The Perseus Series (Southampton City Art Gallery). Burne-Jones often painted alternative versions of compositions, sometimes in different media, either with several patrons in mind or to retain one for himself. Examples of this include King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Annunciation, The Depths of the Sea and the Wheel of Fortune. Such were the demands he set himself that his studio in the 1890s contained numerous works that remained incomplete at his death, including The Wizard (Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery), The Sirens (The John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Arts, Sarasota), The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico), The Car of Love (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), The Troy Triptych (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) and his great cycle of paintings The Perseus Series (Southampton City Art Gallery). The British Museum contains a self-mocking caricature from circa 1890, Unfinished Masterpieces, in which Burne-Jones depicts himself engulfed by canvases.

Burne-Jones’ studio assistant, Thomas Rooke, noted on 6 April 1896 that he had been ‘laying in a replica of Aurora on a new canvas’ (Mary Lago (ed.), op. cit., 1981, p.90), indicating that Rooke traced the composition of Aurora from the finished painting to the present canvas, which was subsequently painted by Burne-Jones himself. Contemporary records again reveal Burne-Jones’ habit of working on pictures simultaneously. Directly referring to changes he made to both Auroras Burne-Jones remarked, ‘I did it on the other one first – that’s the good of having two pictures, one to wash the other, as Mr Morris says of having two shirts.’ (Lago, op. cit., p.98)

Burne-Jones died on 17 June 1898 leaving this canvas unfinished, and that incompleteness proved to its benefit in contrast to the Queensland version, which was reworked in the final months by Burne-Jones’ son Philip, a professional artist who lived under the shadow of his father’s reputation. He would sometimes influence his father’s later works, and of the changes made to the Queensland Aurora, W. Graham Robertson lamented that, ‘her robes were colourless, her face pale, and her hair almost grey’ (Kerrison Preston (ed.), Letters from Graham Robertson, London, 1953, p.442). The present version however retains the effect of ‘a radiant figure clad in the rose and gold of dawn, with flushed cheeks and golden hair.’ (ibid.).

Aurora is the culmination of a sequence of temporal allegories pursued since the early 1870s: Day and Night (both 1870, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard), Vesper (1872), Luna (1872, ex-collection Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé) and The Hours (1882, Sheffield Museums). More broadly, it belongs to the Aesthetic Movement’s project of painting women as personifications of music, season and hour, including Albert Moore, J.A.M. Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lord Leighton. His Flaming June, also a temporal hymn depicting a woman clad in brilliant orange, was finished in 1895. Another strong resonance is European. The showing of King Cophetua at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 had established Burne-Jones as the key British figure for the Continental Symbolists, and in the years around Aurora the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, a close friend and his most articulate European champion, was publishing appreciative analyses in The Studio. The elongated, weightless figure here belongs as much to that fin-de-siècle idiom as to the Aesthetic parlour: she is sister to the women of Khnopff, Moreau and the younger Klimt, and anticipates, at a decade’s distance, the Vienna Secession art movement.

The paintings within Burne-Jones’ final years distil a lifetime’s occupation enthralled to the poetry and drama of human existence, drawn from the canon of Western literature and given their own unmistakable ‘Burne-Jones’ essence – figures that are haunting, melancholic and enchanting. Aurora is one such example from Burne-Jones’ extraordinary canon – a beautiful and bewitching image which, exceptionally, is one of the few major oils still in private hands, having been kept within the artist’s family until its acquisition by a private collector in 2019.