The Hours depicts the passing of time, with the same figure representing each stage from morning until evening. Morning is symbolised by this figure waking and brushing her hair whilst by the evening she is shown sleeping. Burne-Jones has used colour and light to create harmony throughout the work. It is a complicated and detailed design that took him twelve years to complete. He wrote ‘Every little lady … wears a lining of the colour of the hour before her and a sleeve of the hour coming after.’ Burne-Jones was greatly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, whose interests lay in depicting medieval and mythical subject matter.
The Hours (fig. 89) and The Wheel of Fortune (cat. no. 52) fol- lowed in 1883. The first was an Albert Moore-like group of seated figures conceived in the 1860s but overlaid with a Mantegnesque veneer as it developed. Burne-Jones described it as "a row of six little women that typify the hours of day from waking to sleep. Their little knees look so funny in a row that wit descended on me from above, and I called them 'the laps of time.' Every little lady besides the proper colour of her own frock wears a lining of the colour of the hour before her and a sleeve of the hour coming after — so that Mr Whistler could, if he liked, call it a fugue." 20 Fortune belonged to Arthur Balfour (1848— 1930), who had commissioned the Perseus series in 1875. A rising Tory politician and amateur philoso- pher (which is perhaps why he liked Fortune), Balfour was a leading figure in the social group known as The Souls, which came to prominence in the 1880s. Eschewing the vulgar hedonism of the Prince of Wales's Marlborough House set, they cultivated aesthetic and intellectual interests, and Burne- Jones was their favorite painter. Frances Graham (cat. no. 107) — Mrs. (later Lady) Horner from her marriage in 1883 — was another luminary Indeed, the redoubtable Lady Paget called her the "high priestess" of the coterie, a reflection not so much of her social position as of the fact that she was known to be on intimate terms with Burne-Jones. In later life he indulged in a number of sentimental but platonic relation- ships with young women. Frances was the most important of these Egerias, followed by Helen Mary Gaskell (fig. 90), although her star was not to rise until the 1890s.
First Image: Five Sibyls Seated in Niches: the Babylonian, Libyan, Delphic, Cimmerian and Erythraean Sandro Botticelli (1444/1445–1510) (studio of) Christ Church, University of Oxford (800×433) Second: image Five Sibyls Seated in Niches: the Samian, Cumean, Hellespontic, Phrygian and Tiburtine Filippino Lippi (c.1457–1504) Christ Church, University of Oxford
The catalogue of The Grosvenor Gallery Summer exhibition 1883 states that the hours was begun in 1870.