The Mill

The Mill, painted in 1882 and held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is one of Burne-Jones's most enigmatic large-scale works, depicting three women dancing before a mill wheel beside a stream while three musicians play nearby. The subject combines the pastoral tradition with an almost ritualistic, myth-inflected quality that resists simple narrative identification. Critics have associated the work with various literary sources without establishing a definitive text, which may reflect Burne-Jones's deliberate ambiguity — the image aspires to a condition of pure mood and visual poetry rather than illustration. The mill setting, with its turning wheel, carries inevitable associations with the cycles of fate and time, connecting this work to his Wheel of Fortune of the same period. The Victoria and Albert Museum's holding places it alongside other major Burne-Jones holdings in one of Britain's most important collections of decorative and fine art.

Large-scale oil on canvas with the smooth, carefully modulated surface of Burne-Jones's mature style. The figure groups — dancers and musicians — are arranged in the processional, frieze-like manner he derived from Greek vase painting and Italian Renaissance relief sculpture. The palette has a silvery, water-reflected quality appropriate to the millstream setting.