Photographed in the Long Gallery, Crewe Hall, Cheshire in the late 19th century. These three drawings were all made in preparation for one of Burne-Jones’ most famous and powerful paintings, The Wheel of Fortune. The two drawings depicting elaborate plaited hair-styles are probably of a slightly earlier date than the central drawing and suggest that Burne-Jones experimented with Fortune’s hair before finally wrapping it in a head-dress. The central drawing appears to be the definitive drawing for the head of Fortune in the primary version of The Wheel of Fortune, painted for the Conservative politician and future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) which he seems to have been working upon until its exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883. It was probably also used for the watercolour version also made in 1875 (Hammersmith and Fulham Libraries, Cecil French Bequest) and the small oil thought to have been completed around the same time (The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Fortuna/Fortune was the Roman Goddess of Fate and of Fortune (the Greek equivalent was Tyche), the daughter of Jupiter. She was beautiful but as the controller of Man's destiny, both for good or bad, she was also powerful. Her name derives from the word Vortumna (she who revolves the year) and her symbol was a rotating golden wheel upon which the fate of humanity is decided. Ovid described her standing atop the wheel, 'who admits by her unsteady wheel her own fickleness; she always has its apex beneath her swaying foot.' The model for Fortune was the actress Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), regarded by many as the most beautiful woman in London. She was eagerly sought after as a model by the artists who worshipped her and was painted by Leighton, Watts, Poynter, Dicksee and Millais. Although it is her portraits that are best known, particularly that of Millais' in which she is depicted wearing her famous black dress, she was depicted by Poynter as Helen of Troy and as a wood-nymph by Leighton in his Idyll. Langtry wrote to the Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1909 to confirm that she had briefly been Burne-Jones' model and she recorded the sittings in her autobiography, The Days I Knew in 1925; 'Clad in grey draperies, a tall, very tall figure, I am depicted with resolute and pitiless face, turning a huge wheel on which kings, princes, statesmen, millionaires and others rise, reach the top, and then fall, to be crushed by the ever-revolving wheel of Fate - a cruel picture, but horribly true.' Burne-Jones' son Philip recorded that The Wheel of Fortune was his father's favourite painting and the one that he considered to be the most successful. It was the picture that would have the most far-reaching influence with the international Symbolist Movement. When the version now at the Musee d'Orsay was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883, the critic for Art Journal, usually hostile of Burne-Jones' work, described it as; 'the most noteworthy among the imaginative pictures of the year' (Art Journal, June 1883, p.203). John Ruskin examined its potency in his last commentary on the artist's work, a lecture of 1883 entitled 'Mythic Schools of Painting' in which he celebrated the depiction of the; 'gradual 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.' (Ruskin, Works, vol. 33, 1908, p.293) Burne-Jones himself wrote to his friend Helen Gaskell, of the personal significance the painting was to have for him: 'My Fortune's Wheel is a true image, and we take our turn at it, and are broken upon it' (Letter dated March 1893). Sotheby's 2015
There is a possibility that these three drawings were framed together by the artist and sold through the Old Watercolor Society Exhibition of Winter 1894 . The catalogue entries 229, 233 and 235 all list "Various studies" as documented in the Old Watercolour Society's Annual of 1931-2. The mount and frame are in the manor of Monsieur Gueraud who worked for Burne-Jones, Walter Crane and George Howard and appear to be original. Gueruad arrived in London as a refugee from the Paris commune c. 1870 and immediately gathered a reputation for quality of presentation.
19.7 x 16.8; 25.1 x 16.5; 19.9 x 16.8 cms