Day

Day (1870), executed in gouache and held at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, belongs to the paired Day and Night allegories that Burne-Jones produced alongside the Days of Creation series. Personification allegories — figures embodying abstract concepts — were a staple of Renaissance and Baroque painting that Burne-Jones engaged through the lens of Italian quattrocento sources, particularly Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo. A figure representing Day would typically be rendered in bright, gold or white robes with attributes of light — the sun, a torch, dawn imagery — while maintaining the languid, slightly melancholy physical type that Burne-Jones consistently preferred even for positive allegorical subjects. The Fogg's collection, which also holds Days of Creation — Fifth, suggests Harvard acquired multiple related works from this period, building a small constellation of Burne-Jones's allegorical production.

Gouache on paper allows the flat, jewel-bright color fields and crisp contour lines that suit allegorical personification — the figure needs to read clearly as a symbolic type while remaining physically beautiful. The light-related attributes of Day would exploit gouache's capacity for luminous whites and bright golds.