The Garden of the Hesperides

The Garden of the Hesperides, painted in 1881 on panel and held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, depicts the mythological garden at the western edge of the world where the golden apple tree of Hera was tended by the nymph daughters of Hesperus and guarded by the dragon Ladon. The subject — one of Burne-Jones's recurrent mythological themes — offered him the opportunity to create an image of suspended, enchanted stillness: a paradise maintained only by eternal vigilance against disturbance, the perfect metaphor for the Aesthetic ideal of art as a sealed, self-sufficient realm of beauty. The panel support recalls Italian quattrocento devotional works and allows a very smooth, detailed surface. The Victoria and Albert Museum's holding places the work in dialogue with the applied arts and decorative design traditions that Burne-Jones served throughout his career through Morris and Company.

Oil on panel with the smooth, jewel-like surface that the support encourages. The palette is likely warm with the gold and green tonalities associated with mythological garden subjects. The circular or enclosed compositional format that Burne-Jones often used for Hesperides subjects creates a sense of self-contained perfection.