The Car of Love (Love's Wayfaring)

The Car of Love (Love's Wayfaring), painted in 1894 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, belongs to Burne-Jones's sustained engagement with allegorical subjects in which Love as an abstract force is personified and staged as a narrative actor. The image of Love's chariot or car carrying figures through a landscape belongs to a long tradition of courtly allegory running from Petrarch's Trionfi through Renaissance painting to Victorian Aestheticism. Burne-Jones was deeply versed in this tradition through his reading of medieval poetry and his engagement with Dante, and his treatment of the car-of-love subject reflects genuine scholarly engagement with the allegorical iconography he was deploying. The V&A holds the work as part of its Burne-Jones holdings, recognising it as a significant late allegorical canvas.

The chariot composition gives Burne-Jones a strong horizontal movement across the canvas surface, with figures in various postures of willing or unwilling transit. Love as a figure — typically young, winged, holding a bow — is placed as the driver or conductor of the procession. The palette is warm and golden, appropriate to the allegorical sunlit world of courtly love poetry.