The challenge in the Wilderness and the preceding composition -The Wedding of Psyche (cat. no. 41) were worked out through pencil designs in an 1865 volume of studies (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; 1927P648), and they are united in the second panel of the Palace Green frieze. A note in Burne-Jones's work record for 1875 that he had "designed trumpeters for Psyche's procession" suggests that he was already thinking of reworking them separately, although there is no evidence that he began to do this until the 1890s. 1 The Wedding of Psyche was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1895, but The Challenge in the Wilderness, as Burne-Jones had referred to it in 1894, remained unfinished, and was included in the first studio sale of 1898. Both appear, unframed and on easels, in a photograph of the artist s home studio at The Grange, Fulham, published in the Art Annual monograph of Christmas 1894. 2 A reproductive engraving of The Wedding of Psyche by Felix Jasinski (1862-1901) was published by Arthur Tooth and Sons in 1900. 3 These works exemplify the degree of self-contained abstrac- tion which Burne-Jones's painting had reached by the mid- 1890s. The last vestiges of naturalism give way to an extreme stylization in figurative detail, most notable in the attenuated hands and faces, as well as in the heavily weighted, seemingly brittle drapery. The dominating blue-green tones, first explored in the Perseus series (cat. nos. 88-97), here give an even eerier cast to the ghostly figures as they proceed through the barren landscape. 1. A small (11 1/4 X 8 in.) but highly finished pencil drawing of The Challenge in the Wilderness, certainly of later date, was sold at Sotheby's (Books), October 30, 1997, lot 54. 2. Cartwright 1894, p. 31. 3. Hartnoll 1988, p. 50, pl. 20.
Signed and dated lower left E B J 1895