The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon (1894) was Burne-Jones's final major work, left unfinished at his death in 1898, and represents the culmination of his lifelong engagement with Arthurian legend. The enormous canvas — over 21 feet wide — depicts the mortally wounded King Arthur tended by three queens on the island of Avalon where, according to legend, he sleeps awaiting the time of Britain's greatest need. The work occupied Burne-Jones for the last decade of his life, and its horizontal format, processional arrangement of attendant figures, and emphasis on the sleeping central figure make it one of the most ambitious decorative compositions in Victorian art. The subject's themes of suspended death, waiting, and the hope of future resurrection resonated with the elegiac tone of the fin-de-siècle and with Burne-Jones's own meditation on mortality as he aged. The collection information is not recorded, suggesting it may be in a private or institutional collection that has changed hands.

The monumental horizontal canvas required Burne-Jones to manage compositional scale of a different order from his earlier works — the sleeping Arthur at center flanked by the queen attendants in processional arrangement demanded a frieze-like horizontal rhythm rather than the vertical figure groups of earlier paintings. The work's unfinished state means some passages are more resolved than others.