Begun in about 1891, this picture has much of the same enigmatic quality as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (cat no. 112), with a similar feeling of tense, unspoken narra- tive. In the depiction of an old man revealing to a young woman the image of a shipwreck, there is an obvious associa- tion to be made with the opening of Shakespeare's The Tempest, although the artist made no recorded reference to the figures being those of Prospero and Miranda; he called it sim- ply his "Maiden and Necromancer picture." 1 The girl's face is that of Frances Horner, the daughter of Burne -Jones's princi- pal patron, William Graham, and perhaps there is an element of fanciful autobiography to be read into the subject, as one of the artist conjuring up visions in his studio to entrance his beautiful young friend and model. Burne-Jones returned to the work several times over the next few years, without quite bringing it to completion. In conversation withT. M. Rooke in 1896 he referred to it as "one of my failures, it always stuck," 2 but this dissatisfaction can be partly explained by his avowedly hopeless longing "to do a pic- ture like a Van Eyck and I've never never done it, and never shall. As a young man I've stood before that picture of the man and his wife and made up my mind to try and do something as deep and rich in colour and as beautifully finished in paint- ing, and I've gone away and never done it, and now the time s gone by." 3 In February 1897, wnen ne was painting the copper vessels and tripod, he went again to the National Gallery to look at Jan van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, Giovanna Cenami (1434), but saw only "how clearly the like of it is not to be done by me. I should think its the finest picture in the world." 4 There are two compositional studies in colored chalks, one showing only the figures, the other with all the interior detail, though with a simpler form of brazier. 5 1. Lago 1981, p. 84 (entry for January 18, 1896). Under 1897 in his work record, Burne-Jones entered the note: "worked on the picture of the Sorcerer, not yet named" (Burne-Jones 1900, p. 161). The title The Wizard seems to date from the New Gallery exhibition of 1898-99. 2. Lago 1981, p. 84 (entry for January 18, 1896). 3. Ibid., p. 132 (entry for February 3, 1897). 4. Ibid., p. 136 (entry for February 19, 1897). 5. Sold at Christie's, October 27, 1970, lot 213, and Christie's, June 15, 1971, lot 139, respectively.