.......... The hero stood, His bright face shadowed by the jaws of death, His hair blown backwards by the poisonous breath .............. the blue blade did meet The wrinkled neck, and with no faltering stroke, Like a god's hand the fell enchantment broke. Along with the comparable scene of the rescue of Andromeda in the Perseus series (cat. no. 96), this is among Burne-Jones's most animated compositions. After Saint George and the Dragon and Cupid and Psyche, his ten- dency moved toward symbolic representation — even in treat- ing the passion and mayhem of the Trojan War (cat. nos. 50-53) — rather than dramatic narrative. On seeing the Saint George paintings again at Christie's in 1894, Georgiana Burne-Jones was "surprised by their dramatic character. ... I spoke of this to Edward afterwards, asking him whether he had not purposely suppressed the dramatic element in his later work, and he said yes, that was so for no one can get every qual- ity into a picture, and there were others that he desired more than the dramatic." 1 Some of the finest preparatory drawings for the series, now at Birmingham, are for this scene and include several power- ful nude studies for the figure of Saint George; a large and vig- orous compositional design for the saints fight with the dragon shows the figures reversed. 2 In the oil Saint George's armor is again of burnished black, inevitably echoing the depic- tion of Carpaccio's Saint George and the Dragon (ca. 1502-8) in the Scuola di San Giorgio, Venice, of which Burne-Jones had made a copy on his visit in 1862. 3 The oil painting, quite heavily reworked, is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. 4 A watercolour version of the main image of Saint George and the Dragon was painted in 1868 (William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow); in it, the figure of the princess, tied to a stake, appears in the middle distance. 5 1. Memorials, vol. 1, pp. 296-97. The passage continues: "It was seldom that his own family asked him any questions about his work as he did it, for we saw how little he liked to talk of a thing before it was done, and realised what would be the irksomeness to him of anything like a run- ning commentary on it." 2. Birmingham collection 1939, p. 72 (i2'o4); Art Services International 1995-96, no. 80. 3. Musee des Beaux- Arts de Nantes 1992, no. 3. 4. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna 1986, no. 15. 5. Reproduced in Harrison and Waters 1973, pi. 13.
'The Fight' (or 'St George kills the Dragon'), related to a painting in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, (no.5) from a group of six drawings depicting the legend of 'St George and the Dragon'; figure wearing armour, standing over and thrusting his sword into a dragon, at right the princess kneeling, with hands clasped, and watching, field beyond, and woodland in distance.