The right hand portion of the study once owned by Virginia Surtees, and at various times had been offered for sale by the Maas Gallery, Hartnoll & Eyre, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and more recently Bauman Rare Books in the USA. The right hand portion of the study was offered for sale at Christie’s, London on 6 June 2002, lot 85, the sheet’s dimensions were given as 47 x 34 cm, exactly matching the vertical dimension of the present sheet.
This study was made in the later stages of the painting,s design, after the squared up drawing by an assistant, in which Burne-jones experimented by introducing more figures.
Study for 'The Sirens' coloured chalks on brown paper 181/2 x 13 3/8 in. (47 x 34 cm.) PROVENANCE with J.S. Maas, London. Kenneth Lohf, New York. NOTES This elegant and very freely handled drawing shows Burne-Jones's later style at its most abstract and mannered. Like so many of his later paintings, The Sirens (Ringling Museum, Sarasota, California) was designed in the early 1870s, a period when his imagination was particularly fertile, but it was not begun on canvas until about 1891, and was still incomplete at his death in 1898. Many of his drawings of the 1890s are connected with the project. For a fuller account, see S. Wildman and J. Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York, 1999, p. 321, no. 157. SALESROOM NOTICE Please note the additional information on this lot: EXHIBITED London, Maas Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites and their Contemporaries, 1967. London, Picadilly Gallery and Hartnoll and Eyre, Drawings, Paintings, and Studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 8-25 June 1971, no. 11, ilustrated in catalogue. New York, Grolier Club, Sir Edward Burne-Jones from the Collection of Kenneth A. Lohf, 4 November - 11 December 1971. LITERATURE Kenneth A. Lohf, 'The Burne-Jonesiness of Burne-Jones: A Collector's Discovery of an Artist's Life and Work', Gazette of the Grolier Club (May 1972) pp. 48-9.