Said by his son to have been Burne-Jones's particular favorite among his finished oil paintings, The Wheel of Fortune has always been considered one of his most powerful and suc- cessful compositions. Even the traditionally hostile Art Journal critic, reviewing the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition of 1883, found it "the most noteworthy among the imaginative pictures of the year," 1 By allowing the wheel to fill the picture plane from top to bottom, an illusion of immense scale is created, bal- ancing the huge and implacable goddess against the helpless mortal figures who represent a slave, a king, and a poet. John Ruskin, in his last commentary on Burne-Jones's work in "Mythic Schools of Painting," one of the Art of England lec- tures delivered in May 1883, praised the conception of "grad- ual and irresistible motion of rise and fall, — the tide of Fortune, as distinguished from instant change or catastrophe, ... of the connection of the fates of men with each other, the yielding and occupation of high place, the alternately appointed and inevitable humiliation." 2 When Burne-Jones himself was in a desolate mood, he wrote to his young confidante Helen Gaskell, "My Fortune's Wheel is a true image, and we take our turn at it, and are broken upon it." 3 The picture was conceived and begun in 1875, and may have been seen at an early stage dur- ing a visit that year by the aes- thetically minded Conservative politician Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), who became its first owner. There are five other versions in various media, including a smaller oil of 1885 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), more golden in tone than the steely blues of the Paris canvas. 4 The Timess critic, Tom Taylor, was won over by the picture's "wonderful technical skills . . . the beauty of the greys, yellows and flesh tints . . . [and] the admirable drawing of the figures, which shows that the artist has quite got rid of the faults of draughtsmanship which were noticeable in his work only a few years ago." 5 Numerous drawings survive (see cat. no. 53) for many details of figure and drapery, demon- strating how thoroughly Burne-Jones would rehearse every element of a design. It has frequently been observed that the powerful nudes echo the work of Michelangelo, particularly the Captives in the Accademia, Florence, which Burne-Jones recorded in a sketchbook from his Italian journey of 1871, and The Dying Slave in the Louvre, of which he owned a small plaster copy (along with others of Day and Evening from San Lorenzo, Florence). On the 1871 trip he had made a special study of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican: "He bought the best opera glasses he could find, folded his railway rug thickly, and, lying down on his back, read the ceiling from beginning to end, peering into every corner and revelling in its execution." 6 Like some of his best stained-glass designs of the 1870s (see cat. no. 69), the figure of Fortune is equally imbued with the spirit of Michelangelo's statuesque Sibyls. Such an homage was recog- nized by contemporary critics, including F. G. Stephens, who wrote in the Athenaeum that Fortune was like "a gigantic stat- ue of grey and golden coloured marbles . . . her beauty is sculp- turesque, and her face has the sadness of Michael Angelo's 'Night.'" 7 1. Art Journal r , June 1883, p. 203. 2. Ruskin, Works, vol. 33 (1908), p. 293. 3. Letter of March 1893 to Helen Gaskell, quoted in Fitzgerald 1975, p. 245. 4. See Christian 1984b. 5. Times (London), May 4, 1883, p. 4. 6. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 26. 7. Athenaeum, April 28, 1883, p. 547.
At the same time, he painted his anguish privately in a work to be shown to no one outside his most intimate circle. “Souls by the Styx” describes, in an artistic language that the Victorian public could not possibly understand, the despair of lost souls trapped in limbo. Here Dante was the medieval source and the Renaissance supplied the foundation for his haunted figures. From this point forward he proceeded to overlay his medieval motives with those acquired from his study of Renaissance masters, for instance, The Wheel of Fortune (Cat. 147), a favourite medieval concept which occurs in innumerable manuscripts. The upper figure draws upon Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (1513-16 fig. 75).
Signed and dated E.B.J. MDCCCLXXXIII Fitzwilliam work list: 1875 ..began the large Fortune ...1879 ...worked on Fortune. Fortune worked on me from July till October ...1881 ... Worked on Big Fortune In 1865 Burne-Jones designed The Fates. A pair of lovers embrace before the Fates seated above, an early sketch shows a unhappy mother with her child to the right. The previous Autumn the family had been seriously ill and Georgiana had lost a child. The mood of this sketch reflects the artist's depression. A subtle change occurred in the meantime and by 1870 his reflection on life had developed and it was now Fortune who turned the wheel of fate on mankind. Mentally Burne-Jones' was coming to terms and absolving himself from the responsibility of the loss of the child and his recent extra-marital affair.
L. Bénédite, Deux idéalistes: Gustave Moreau et E. Burne-Jones (Paris, 1899). Critics writing in establishment periodicals tended not to class Burne-Jones and Watts as Symbolists, often opting for the designation of ‘idéaliste’ instead. Richard Thomson suggests that Bénédite, as a state functionary and curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, was especially eager to dissociate Moreau (who had just left his vast personal collection to the nation) from the less salubrious fringes of Symbolism, particularly Lorrain and Huysmans (Thomson 2004, pp. 27-28); this may explain his decision to classify Moreau and Burne-Jones under a heading with more high-minded connotations.