Angel Playing a Flageolet

Angel Playing a Flageolet, painted in 1878 and now at Sudley House, Liverpool, belongs to the rich tradition of musical angel imagery that runs from medieval manuscript illumination through Renaissance altarpiece wings to Victorian Aesthetic painting. Burne-Jones produced many angel subjects throughout his career, and the musician angel was a recurring figure in his stained glass and decorative work as well as in his paintings. The flageolet — a small end-blown flute — was a common iconographic instrument in angel imagery, associated with celestial music and spiritual harmony. By 1878 Burne-Jones was at the height of his creative powers and his decorative sensibility, and this angel figure shows the fully developed integration of musical subject, visual rhythm, and Aesthetic ideal facial type that characterised his mature work.

Burne-Jones renders the angel's drapery with the fluid, layered glazing technique that produces his characteristic luminous fabric surfaces. The instrument is painted with careful attention to its cylindrical form and the precise placement of the angel's fingers on its holes. The composition is organised around the vertical axis of the figure and the horizontal of the held flageolet.