Earth Mother

Earth Mother (1882) at the Museo de Arte de Worcester is an allegorical figure work in which Burne-Jones personified the generative power of the natural world as a monumental female figure. By the early 1880s Burne-Jones had moved away from purely literary and mythological subjects toward large-scale symbolic paintings that aspired to the condition of universal allegory. The earth mother figure — associated with fertility, growth, and the sustaining capacity of the natural world — had roots in classical antiquity and in the goddess traditions that Victorian scholarship was excavating through comparative mythology. Burne-Jones rendered such figures with the physical weight and gravity appropriate to primordial forces, distinguishing them from the more delicate, melancholy women of his narrative paintings. The Worcester collection, which holds a significant group of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movement works, acquired this as representative of Burne-Jones's allegorical ambitions.

A large allegorical figure like Earth Mother would deploy Burne-Jones's most architecturally resolved compositional approach — the figure placed monumentally against a natural or abstract ground, drapery used to establish the body's mass and the gravitational pull appropriate to an earth deity. Color would lean toward earth tones and greens to reinforce the subject.