Music

Music, painted in 1877 in oil on canvas and held at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, personifies music as a solitary, contemplative feminine figure. The date is significant: 1877 was the year of Burne-Jones's triumphant debut at the Grosvenor Gallery, when he exhibited several major works and overnight became the most celebrated painter in Britain. Music belongs to the group of personification subjects — alongside Love, Poetry, Night, Day — that Burne-Jones produced throughout his career as single-figure mood images closer to the condition of music itself than to narrative painting. The Ashmolean Museum's Oxford collection has strong holdings in this area, befitting the university's long association with aesthetic and literary culture. Music as an allegorical subject carried particular resonance in the late 1870s, when Walter Pater's famous dictum that 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music' was widely circulating in British intellectual culture.

Oil on canvas with Burne-Jones's characteristic smooth surface and restrained palette. The single-figure format concentrates the compositional energy on the quality of the figure's pose and the expression of absorbed, self-sufficient reverie. Drapery would be treated as a visual equivalent of musical flow — continuous, unhurried, rhythmically resolved.