The Feast of Peleus

The Feast of Peleus, painted in 1889 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, depicts the mythological wedding banquet of the sea-nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus at which the goddess of discord Eris threw the golden apple inscribed 'to the fairest,' setting in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Trojan War. Burne-Jones chose this moment — the origin of the war of Troy — as a subject that compressed an immense narrative consequence into a single social scene. The V&A collection holds the work as part of its significant holdings of Victorian painting. By 1889 Burne-Jones was at the peak of his public reputation, his work regularly exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and acclaimed across Europe. The feast subject allowed him to compose a rich, multi-figure scene of gods and heroes gathered at table.

A multi-figure banquet composition of this scale required careful spatial organisation and individual differentiation of the assembled deities. Burne-Jones arranges the figures in his characteristic processional or recumbent groups, exploiting the long horizontal format that he favoured for complex mythological scenes. The palette is rich and jewelled, appropriate to the divine gathering.