The Beguiling of Merlin

The Beguiling of Merlin, painted between 1872 and 1877 and now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, is one of Burne-Jones's most celebrated works and a landmark of Victorian painting. The subject — taken from Tennyson's Idylls of the King and ultimately from the Arthurian tradition — shows Nimue (or Viviane) using the very spells Merlin taught her to imprison the magician in an enchanted sleep within a hawthorn tree. The model for Nimue was Maria Zambaco, with whom Burne-Jones had a consuming and ultimately ruinous love affair in the late 1860s and early 1870s; her face pervades numerous works of this period. The painting thus operates on a deeply personal as well as literary level: it is simultaneously an image of male intellectual power rendered helpless by female beauty and an encoded self-portrait of the artist's own psychological captivity. Lord Lever acquired it for his model village collection at Port Sunlight, where it remains.

Large-scale oil on canvas with a painstakingly built surface of thin, glazed layers producing deep tonal saturation. The dense hawthorn foliage — every leaf individually rendered — creates a suffocating decorative surround that reinforces the theme of entrapment. The serpentine linearity of the composition reflects Burne-Jones's sustained engagement with quattrocento Italian sources.