
Peter Rees
Director
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Sold for £24,320 inc. premium
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Provenance
With The Fine Art Society, 1896.
William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, 1922.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Liverpool 1922-1958, numbered 1783.
Sale, Christie's, London, 'Modern pictures and Drawings mainly of the British School of the Nineteenth Century, the Property of the Trustees of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, coming from the collection of the 1st Lord Leverhulme', 6th June 1958, part of lot 27 (sold with another pastel The Failure of Gawaine and Sir Ewain.
Private collection, UK.
Because of the simplicity of the draperies and drawing of the Angel's wing, it is suggested that this pastel (possibly cut down from a larger cartoon) was made in the early stages of the evolution of the tapestry. Variations occur in the position of the hands and in the structure of the door from the final design. This pastel was sold in 1958 by Leverhulme with another entitled The Failure of Sir Gawaine and Sir Ywain. It is not beyond credence that this was the other half of the composition and it had been therefore previously cut down: the measurements of this piece imply that if it was part of a cut down design it was larger than the cartoon that followed (now in a private collection) and was the same scale as the pastel of The Attainment (Birmingham City Art Gallery, acc no. 1949P6). It is interesting to note that in the preparation of a tapestry, Burne-Jones was very concerned with colour and background, unlike the simpler processes involved in the making of a stained glass window that he had developed with Morris & Co., where he left the introduction of colour entirely to Morris.
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.