The Love Song

The Love Song (1868–1877), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is one of Burne-Jones's most serene and musicologically suggestive paintings, showing three figures — two women and an armored knight — gathered around a small organ in a garden setting. The subject has no specific literary source; rather, it embodies the Aesthetic movement's claim that painting should aspire to the condition of music — autonomous, structural, concerned with form and sound rather than narrative or moral instruction. Walter Pater's famous formulation was published in 1873, but Burne-Jones had been moving toward this position since the late 1860s, and The Love Song is among his most direct enactments of it. The Metropolitan's acquisition of this work, one of the most important Burne-Jones paintings outside Britain, reflects the international prestige he achieved by the 1880s when it was acquired.

The painting's orchestration of grey-blue tones throughout — armor, drapery, foliage, distance — creates the tonal unity that Burne-Jones associated with musical harmony. The small portable organ at the composition's center provides the structural and thematic anchor around which the three figures are arranged.