A study for the figure on the extreme right of the third row back in the picture. The painting, also called Love’s Wayfaring, for which these are studies, was begun in 1870, a date at which Burne-Jones had a strong sense of the overwhelming and destructive power of love, because of his traumatic relationship with Maria Zambaco. He continued work on the painting in the 1880’s & 1890’s, and these drawings date from the later period. Graham Robertson, a friend in the 1890’s, recollected it in Burne-Jones’s studio, and described the composition and its meaning. Above us towered the great picture, reaching almost from floor to roof. High aloft, fast bound to his own triumphal car, stood the figure of blind Love, himself at once the god and the sacrifice; behind him swirled splendid masses of wind-blown drapery, leaving the white body naked. The car, mounted on huge wheels, swept down a narrow street, leaving no space on either side and before it, drawing it along by cords, ran a crowd of naked men and women, some laughing and shouting as they sped along, others looking back in growing terror as they realised that the great car was now moving by its own impetus and that they must run on and on or be crushed beneath its weight. The painting, which was never finished, is today in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The Car of Love (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) was conceived in 1872 as a lifesize composition, one of several which, as Burne-Jones wrote in his work-record, 'above all other I desire to paint and count my chief designs for some years to come'. The picture was still unfinished when he died suddenly in June 1898, filling an entire end wall of the studio he built at the bottom of the garden at The Grange, his house in Fulham (see S. Wildman and J. Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, 1998, p. 148, fig. 83). The composition, based on one of the 'Triumphs' of Petrarch, shows Cupid being pulled down a city street by a crowd of happy or despondent lovers. One of the present drawings may be a study for the figure second from the right in the second row back in the picture. The other is undoubtedly for the figure on the extreme right of the third row back. Both probably date from the early 1890s.