Burne Jones’ Pygmalion Series

Celajes (Oswaldo Dubón) piano José M. Armenta
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Burne Jones’ Pygmalion Series

First image (0:00) – Watercolour versión of “The Heart desires” – ordered by William Graham and finished in 1871

First series (0:09) – Ordered by Euphrosyne Cassavetti (Maria Zambaco’s mother) in 1868 and finished in 1870, actually in Lord Lloyd-Webber’s collection.

Second series (0:51) – Launched in 1869 and finished 1878 – Presented by J. T. Middlemore to the Birmingham Corporation in 1903 and actually at Birmingham Museums.

Last image (1:44) – “The altar of hymen” - Watercolour versión of Pygmalion’s wedding to Galatea - Burne-Jones’ wedding present to Amy Graham ( William Graham’s daughter) in 1874.

The four panels of the complete Pygmalion Series are individually entitled:

1.- “The Heart Desires”, which shows Pygmalion himself standing in his studio, inwardly reflecting on his loneliness.

2.- “The Hand Refrains”, shows the sculptor before the completed image of a woman which was so beautiful that he himself fell in love with it.

3.- “The Godhead Fires”, in which Venus enters the sculptor’s studio in response to Pygmalion’s prayers that the work of art might come to life, to be his mistress and companion.

4.- “The Soul Attains”, by Venus’ divine intervention, this wish was miraculously achieved, and so Pygmalion is seen kneeling before the woman.

Burne-Jones’s interest in the mythological legend of Pygmalion was led in the first place by his friend William Morris’s poem ‘Pygmalion and the Image’. This tells the story of ‘a man of Cyprus, a sculptor named Pygmalion, [who] made an image of a woman, fairer than any that had yet been seen, and in the end came to love his own handiwork as though it had been alive; wherefore, praying to Venus for help, he obtained his end, for she made the image alive indeed, and a woman, and Pygmalion wedded her’. Morris was retelling a legend that is best known in the version given by Ovid in Metamorphoses.
In 1867 Burne-Jones made a sequence of drawings based on the Pygmalion theme, which were intended as designs for illustrations for a projected edition of Morris’s cycle of epic poems, which was to be called The Earthly Paradise. In these twenty-five preparatory drawings (which are now divided between Birmingham City Art Gallery and the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow) lay both the first ideas for the compositions and the unfolding narrative that Burne-Jones would use in the Pygmalion Series.

Jane Burden Morris’ Channel:
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