The Love Song by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt ARA. 1868–77. Oil on canvas, 45 x 61 3/8 in. (114.3 x 155.9 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art Accession Number: 47.26. The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1947. Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Commentary on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
In 1846, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member of the circle of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nine years later he assembled a group of seven friends to help him decorate the Oxford Union Building with scenes from Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." One of the driving forces of this "second Brotherhood" was Edward Burne-Jones. His "Love Song," with its figures reminiscent of the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio and its "Arthurian" landscape bathed in evening light, reflects the profound influence of both the Italian Renaissance and the gothicizing Pre-Raphaelite movement.
This painting is the definitive version of several works that Burne-Jones based on a refrain from an old Breton song: "Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour, / Triste ou gai, tour à tour" (Alas, I know a love song, / Sad or happy, each in turn).Last modified 31 October 2012