The present lot is an elegant head study for The Sirens (Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida, fig. 1), a late, unfinished oil painting which, whilst originally considered in the early 1870s, was not designed until 1880, and only committed to canvas in 1891. Throughout the 1890s Burne-Jones created numerous sketches in connection with this oil, and ‘the bevy of beautiful female figures provided the need (or the excuse) for many individual head studies, all dated 1895 or 1896, which rank among his most delicate pencil drawings’ (S. Wildman and J. Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, 1999, p. 321, no. 157). A very similar pencil study is held in the collection of the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Sirens was commissioned by one of Burne-Jones’s greatest patrons, Frederick Leyland (1831–1892), and in describing the work to him, the artist remarked that he didn’t wish to capture a specific mythological scene, but to depict ‘any sirens, anywhere, that lure on men to destruction’ (G. Burne-Jones, Memorials, London, 1904, p. 222). The scene is therefore not drawn directly from mythology, but is an imaginative and deeply evocative composition. The moment captured is fraught with foreboding as a ship of sailors draw into a bay, surrounded on all sides by the eponymous sirens. The discarded helmets in the foreground betray the coming fate of the sailors who have been lured to shore by these ethereal figures. Executed in dark crepuscular tones, this further imbues the scene with dread and contributes to the work as a meditation on the darker side of desire.
One of Burne-Jones' many friends was Cecilia Steele Maxse, the estranged wife of Admiral Frederick Augustus Maxse and the mother of Violet (later Viscountess Milner) and Olive, who, in their own rights, became close friends of Burne-Jones'. Violet, born in 1872, was the youngest Maxse child. She had a great interest in art, and studied in Paris from March 1893-January 1894. In June 1894, she married Lord Edward Cecil, a soldier and foreign service officer with whom she traveled widely. Their marriage was not a particularly happy one, and after Cecil's death in 1918, Violet married Sir Alfred Milner, who died in 1925. After her brother Leo's death in 1929, she took over editorship of the National Review, owned by their family since 1893. She had 2 children with Lord Cecil, George and Helen. She died in 1958.
Provenance Remaining works of the late Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Bt. (†); Christie's, London, 5 June 1919, lot 25 (24 gns to Gooden & Fox). Lord Leverhulme. Lady Lever Art Gallery; Christie's, London, 6 June 1958, part lot 22 (38 gns to Lewis[?]). with The Swetzoff Gallery, Boston. Mrs Irving Glickman.