This is a study for the head of the Medusa for The Baleful Head, which was the final composition of the 'Perseus Series', and corresponds to the treatment of this crucial motif as it appears in both the watercolour version of the subject in Southampton Art Gallery, of 1885, and in the oil in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (exhibited 1887, fig 1). Perseus holds the head in his left, grasping it by the mass of snakes that form its hair, while he and Andromeda look down at the head's reflection in the surface of a well. Edward Burne-Jones was unusual in the pattern of his early career in that he received virtually no professional training, either at an art school, of which the most prominent in London in the middle years of the 19th century was that run by the Royal Academy, or in the studio of an established artist. In the summer of 1855 he abandoned his studies for a degree in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford, having decided instead to become a designer and painter. He was encouraged in this endeavour by conversations with his friend and fellow-student, William Morris, who was likewise determined to be an artist, and both in turn had been stimulated by the writings of John Ruskin, notably the first two volumes of Modern Painters. Burne-Jones received some informal instruction from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who he met in 1856, and a year later he joined the band of young artists who worked with Rossetti on mural paintings for the newly constructed Oxford University Union debating chamber. Burne-Jones also occasionally attended life drawing classes at Leigh's School in Newman Street, but the instruction received seems to have made little impression upon him. From 1859 to 1861 Burne-Jones taught drawing classes at the Working Men's College in London, specialising in figurative art while Ruskin taught students to draw specimens from nature and landscape. In this period, Burne-Jones made a series of extraordinary drawings in pen and ink, imitative of etched line and ornately patterned across their entire surfaces, showing single or grouped draped figures in landscape settings. Works such as The Wise and Foolish Virgins (private collection) of c. 1859, may be regarded as the springboard for his career as a draughtsman. A lingering medievalism, derived from the artist's friendship with Rossetti, gradually diminished in the early 1860s. These were the years when Burne-Jones was most directly under Ruskin's influence, and it was he who encouraged the younger artist towards a more classical approach and emphasised the vital role that drawing should have in the artistic process. In 1862 Ruskin took Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana to northern Italy, to look at paintings and works of art together and thus for Burne-Jones to appreciate and learn from historical schools of art. Subsequently, and again at Ruskin's behest, Burne-Jones drew from ancient sculpture, studying the forms of anatomy and learning how drapery folds can be used to reveal the dynamic musculature and softness of flesh. As a draughtsman, therefore, Burne-Jones was largely self-taught but also one who in the early stages of his career was influenced by and responded to a succession of people who cared passionately about drawing. For Rossetti and Ruskin, and then for Burne-Jones, drawing represented the vital stage in the preparation of a work of art in which its unique identity was instilled. The act of drawing revealed the most private aspect of an individual's creativity, and in the process of which artists might challenge themselves and search for personal expression. Burne-Jones was to become an artist whose works defined his generation, and one whose reputation and influence was of international extent. His works are a byword for the escapist and romantic culture that came about in Britain in the last four decades of the 19th century. It is, nonetheless, in his drawings that the artist's most essential personality is to be seen and the unique and epicene beauty of the imagery that he created appreciated. Burne-Jones drew for the sheer pleasure of drawing. The sensuousness of his handling of line in ink, pencil or chalk, and his feeling for granular or hatched texture on paper, touches us and allows us to sense the satisfaction, matched by intense concentration, which he felt in making such beautiful images. As the century wore on, increasingly men and women of taste came to value drawings for their own sake, regarding them as complete works of art and with the added virtue of having been made for private delectation. Throughout his career, Burne-Jones made drawings that were independent of any larger creative process, but simply intended to serve the Aesthetic cult whereby a work of art might be seen as a mirror of the artistic soul. On other occasions, however, in fact most usually in terms of the artist's larger production, his drawings served a practical purpose. Compositions were conceived and evolved in swift thumb-nail sketches; figurative elements and physiognomies were defined on the basis of study from the model; the physical gestures and stances that make his pictorial story-telling so immediate were rehearsed in smudged and telegraphic line in the pages of notebooks and albums, and on scraps of paper. Such sketches, however intrinsically beautiful they may be, were made as part of the process by which the elements of his compositions were melded and wrought into the form which he desired. Everything Burne-Jones did, from the murals and schemes of stained glass with which his career as an artist in the public eye commenced, through to his vitally important (though sometimes overlooked) designs as an illustrator, to the paintings and watercolours – whether in single compositions or as series – of mythological or legendary subjects, was prepared in this way. While on the one hand Burne-Jones invented his pictorial imagery with such freedom and spontaneity, and with an impassioned sensuousness which is best appreciated in his work as a draughtsman, on the other, he was conscientious and systematic in the way in which he held the intended eventual work in mind as he devised the myriad elements and details from which it would consist. Amongst this present wonderful group of drawings are studies relating to parts of compositions and schemes, some of which were carried through while others remained incomplete. The connection between these personal and intense observations of the constituent parts of compositions and the finished paintings for which they were intended, is fascinating. In this respect he was working according to the precepts and methods of the painters of the Italian Renaissance, and thus fulfilling Ruskin's ambition on his behalf that he should become their 19th century counterpart.
Provenance F. R. Meatyard, London. Private collection, UK (acquired from the above 30 August 1953). Property of a Charitable Trust.