Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource : The Collection

The Fates - Composition Study

By Sir Edward Burne-Jones

1865

Accession number: 1904P1

Brown wash, heightened with white chalk on two sheets of brown paper.

Width: 178 mm

Height: 318 mm

Central female figure on throne holding scissors and thread, to her left a female figure holds a spindle and thread, to her right a female figure holds the thread aloft, the three representing the three Fates. In front and below them are a male and female figure rerpresenting a pair of lovers.

Information

One of a number of studies in Birmingham's collection related to an unrealised composition called 'The Fates', which Burne-Jones worked on in 1865. This early design for depicts 'the Fates, or Parcae, of Greek myth, hierartically seated behind the figures of two lovers, whose lives they symbolically determine. Clotho, youngest of the sisters, presides over the moment of human birth...; Lachesis, who spins out the events and actions of life; and Atropos, the eldest of the three, cuts the vital thread with a pair of scissors' (Stephen Wildman). On the verso is a study of St Dorothea for 'Theophilus and the Angel' also never completed.

Purchased and presented by subscribers, 1903.
© Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

Makers

Association	Artist	Organisation
Artist	Sir Edward Burne-Jones	-

Literature

Author(s)	Date(s)	Publisher	Pages
Edward Burne-Jones: A Record and Review
Malcolm Bell	1892	George Bell & Sons, London	p. 35

City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery: Catalogue of the Permanent Collection of Drawings
A E Whitley	1939	Bemrose & Sons Ltd, Derby	p. 62

Visions of Love and Life
Stephen Wildman	1995	Art Services International	p. 248, fig 74

Hidden Burne-Jones, Works on paper by Edward Burne-Jones from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
Elisa Korb, Tessa Sidey	2007	Dan Giles, Ltd., London	p. 70