
Peter Rees
Director
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Provenance
With The Piccadilly Gallery, London, 1976.
Private collection, Australia (acquired from the above).
Famously, Summer is known as a portrait of Maria Zambaco, painted during the intensity of her affair with Burne-Jones; the present drawing is its source. It belongs to a series of impassioned drawings of his muse, that the artist created between 1868 and 1874. Technically, the drawing is transitional, in that it still relies on a large amount of texture but anticipates the refinement of the linear drawings that were to develop in the next few years. There is a greater skill in defining the image and mood inspired by the artist's intense feeling for Maria.
The series of six paintings, the four seasons, together with day and night, follow the set of twelve signs of the Zodiac which Burne-Jones had designed in 1866. Prompted by the commission from Frederick Richards Leyland, a wealthy ship owner and patron who was decorating his new house at 49 Princes Gate, Burne-Jones decided to develop the ideas contained in the South Kensington series. Having invested a large amount of his creative energy on the decorative scheme of 14 designs for the museum, Burne-Jones ran with the concept but on a larger scale.
We are grateful to William Waters for compiling this catalogue entry. The work is listed in the Burne-Jones catalogue raisonne, https://www.eb-j.org.