Naworth Castle is situated on the border of England and Scotland. In the later 19th century it was owned by Edward’s close friends George and Rosalind Howard, the Earl and Countess of Carlisle (George had been Burne-Jones’s pupil in the mid 1860’s). It was they who, in 1881, commissioned “Arthur in Avalon”, in which King Arthur’s body lies in state on the “island of apples”. The subject chosen had a particular relevance for them since many of the Arthurian legends were believed to have connections with the Cumbrian locality. Incidentally, during its lengthy creative process, in a fascinating parallel to the painting was the production of Joseph Comyns Carr’s play King Arthur which was produced at the Lyceum Theatre in London on the 12th January, 1895 with Henry Irving as King Arthur, Ellen Terry as Guinevere and Forbes Robertson as Sir Lancelot. Carr was also a co-director of the Grosvenor Gallery, Burne-Jones’s favourite exhibition space which had contributed greatly to his public success. For the play Burne-Jones designed the costumes and the stage sets and on occasions wielded a large brush with the scene painters; so at times he felt was actually being transported into the land of his imaginings. Guinevere: He’s gone, the light of all the world lies dead. Merlin: Not so; he doth but pass who cannot die The King that was, the King that yet shall be; Whose spirit, borne along from age to age, Is England’s to the end. It had been George Howard’s intention to place the large canvas in the library of his 14th century castle and thus artist and patron had chosen a subject which evoked mystical resonances for them. Large numbers of drawings bear witness to the importance Burne-Jones gave to Avalon, as do the numerous compositional oil studies and sketches. At first a raging battle was presented on either side of the Arthur’s resting place but this was rejected as being incompatible. Then the artist experimented with a triptych form, where within the side panels beautiful male and female ‘hill fairies’ are grouped amongst rocks, but this too was discarded although the full size under-painted oil sketches were in the studio at his death. Finally it took the form we see it today, an elegant commanding composition which beckons the viewers and leads them through a door into his imagined and enchanted island. The huge canvas, the largest Burne-Jones ever made, depicts the king, surrounded by beautiful young women, lying in a Byzantine styled mausoleum beneath a canopy decorated with scenes from the Morte d’Arthur. The king’s head lies in Morgan le Fay’s lap (the artist’s daughter Margaret was the model) and, interestingly, one of the “watchers” was Helen Mary Gaskell with whom he was deeply attached at this point in his life. It was to her he confided his most intimate thoughts and it was with her he discussed this, his last great work and it was she who suggested covering the foreground with large swathes of flowers. The women in the painting are in fact queens who await the call to reawaken Arthur who will once again lead his kingdom to overcome the invaders. Burne-Jones began identifying with the King to such an extent that he asked his friend to relinquish the commission and continued to work on the painting until he died. Georgiana noted how her husband, when he slept, began to adopt a similar position to the one in which he had placed the king. In his correspondence he wrote as though he was already on the Isle of Avalon. In this way he began to face the inevitable closure of his own pilgrimage. The allegory contains a reference to his own mortality but it is also a resolution to the guilt imposed by his father on his mother’s death by reversing their positions. Arthur lies dead but is surrounded by feminine youth and vitality. Unfinished, the painting was never meant to be sold. Its future was hardly a concern for the creator; Avalon had become the reality into which he metamorphosed on death.