Study for an uncompleted painting. Previously identified wrongly as a version of Chant D'Amor, although similar in character, this scene is more likely to be an episode from the Morte d'Arthur and made whilst the artist was working on the famous tapestries. ( 1891-4). Unlike Chant D'Amor, the knight is depicted as forlorn, unmoved by the damsel's song. Equally an alternative interpretation has to be considered, the scene could also be interpreted as being an illustration of Keat's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which Burne-Jones had illustrated in the Little Holland House Album of 1859. The Theme of the femme fatale was of perennial interest to him. Tennyson treated the story in his Lancelot and Elaine in his Idylls of the King, in which Lancelot is unable to return the love of Elaine due to his obsession with Queen Guinevere. Lancelot appears here as in Tennyson, twice the age of Elaine. This composition appears in The Secret Book of Designs (British Museum) Acc no 1899.0713.350
It is difficult to be sure of a date for the present drawing, but it appears to relate to Le Chant d'Amour which exists in two versions, a watercolour of 1865 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and an oil begun in 1868 and completed in 1877 (Metropolitan Museum of Art). "The large, final version of Le Chant d'Amour... is one of his (Burne-Jones') most haunting beautiful works. The musical theme, the emotional tension between the figures, the romantic landscape, and the evening light combine to create a mood of nostalgia and yearning which he often aims for but seldom captures in so intense a form." (Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Joones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer, exhibition catalogue for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998, pg. 212). The setting is the type of haunted waste-land which Burne-Jones had often set his romantic scenes, a world of nymphs and lovers, errant knights and courtly ladies. The architecture of the buildings in the background resemble both those in the versions of Le Chant d'Amour and also The Mill begun inn 1874 (Victoria and Albert Museum), Burne-Jones' most elaborate expression of a motif that haunted his imagination, that of a group of buildings - whether warehouse, mills, locks, or water gates - on a stretch of river. it seems likely that the attraction this had for him originated in the "terminal pilgrimages" to the burial place of Fair Rosamund at Godstowe which he made as undergraduate at Oxford in the mid 1850s, locks being a feature of that part of the upper Thames along which he would have walked. (ibid., pg. 251) The highly romantic theme of medieval love is conveyed by the female musician playing to an absorbed male figure. She is a type of Chaucerian earth-b0ound Venus of the type to be found in Burne-Jones' Laus Veneris (Laing Art Gallery), Newcastle Upon Tyne), whilst the male figure appears to be a knight distracted from war by the melody, suggestive of Mars' seduction by the Goddess of Love which had famously been painted by Botticelli. In the watercolour version and oil version of Le Chant d'Amour, the knight is painted in a type of feathery armour for which Burne-Jones is known, whereas in the present drawing he appears to be wearing chain mail. This recalls the type of Byzantine inspired costume worn by the central magi in The Star of Bethlehem of the late 1880s (Birmingham City Art Gallery). The combination of themes of love, beauty and music was one which can be found in many works by Burne-Jones and also by Rossetti and ultimately derives at least in part, to the concert champetres of Northern Italian painters of the Cinquecento, of Titian and Giorgione. We find the same intensity of mood and a similar relationship between a female musician to a male listener in The Lament painted between 1865 and 1866 (William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow) although in this case the overpowering emotion is that of melancholia rather than romance. Sotheby's July 2004