Garden Hesperides

The Garden of the Hesperides (1870), executed in gouache and held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, depicts the mythological garden at the western edge of the world where the golden apples of immortality grew, guarded by the nymphs of the evening (the Hesperides) and a serpent. The legend intersected with the Heracles mythology — retrieving the golden apples was one of his twelve labors — but Burne-Jones was more interested in the garden itself than in the hero's intrusion. The enclosed garden as a place of beauty, stasis, and suspended time recurs in his work and reflects both the hortus conclusus tradition of medieval Christianity and the aesthetic program of the late nineteenth century, which sought spaces apart from industrial modernity. The 1870 Hamburger Kunsthalle gouache is a smaller-scale version of a subject he would return to in a larger oil version later in his career.

Gouache's flat, opaque color is ideal for the enclosed, jewel-like quality of the mythological garden — the golden apples can be rendered as luminous spots of color against the deep greens, and the Hesperides' robes can be given the rich, saturated hues of a world outside ordinary light. The medium's dryness suits the motionless, eternal quality of the subject.