Night

Night, executed on paper in 1870 and now at Harvard Art Museums, belongs to a group of personification works that Burne-Jones produced in this period, treating abstract concepts — Time, Day, Night, Sleep — as single draped figures in states of repose or quiet movement. The personification of Night as a feminine figure, veiled or darkly draped, derives from a tradition stretching back through Renaissance allegory to classical antiquity, with Michelangelo's Night on the Medici tombs as the most celebrated modern precedent. Burne-Jones transformed this tradition through his characteristically Aesthetic sensibility: Night becomes not a mythological being but a mood embodied, a condition of consciousness as much as of the natural world. The Harvard Art Museums hold several works from this period, reflecting the sustained American interest in British Aesthetic Movement painting.

Worked on paper in watercolour or mixed media, with soft, diffused tonal values appropriate to the subject. The palette is centred on deep blues, blacks, and the silver-grey of moonlit surfaces. Burne-Jones's handling of translucent glazes in watercolour could achieve a velvety depth particularly suited to nocturnal subjects.