The Love Song

The Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones was a friend of William Morris from their time at Oxford, and later of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. He designed stained glass and tapestries for Morris’ firm and was also a gifted book illustrator. Between 1864 and 1870, Burne-Jones worked principally in watercolour, afterwards concentrating on oil painting.

The theme of The Love Song (Le Chant d’Amour) was a refrain in Burne-Jones’s work over more than fifteen years. From 1860, he made pencil and red chalk studies, a sepia wash and gouache study, and completed a watercolour. In 1868 Burne-Jones signalled his intention to begin the present large canvas, which he continued to work on in 1871 and 1873, completed after a month’s work in 1877, and showed for the first time at the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition of 1878. Its critical reception was mixed. For Henry James, Le Chant d’Amour resembled “some mellow Giorgione or some richly-glowing Titian” and was “a brilliant success in the way of colour.” By contrast, critic W. H. Mallock reacted against the picture’s latent sexuality, finding in the figure of the woman the “languor of exhausted animalism.”

For Burne-Jones and for his time, Le Chant d’Amour is a key picture in which Romantic medievalism is suffused with a dewy, pastoral warmth emanating from Renaissance Venice. The traditions of manuscript illumination merge with the influences of Botticelli and Titian.