The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune, completed in 1883 and now held at the Musée d'Orsay, is among Burne-Jones's most celebrated and philosophically ambitious works. The subject — the goddess Fortuna turning her wheel to which the figures of a king, a poet, and a slave are bound — is drawn from Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a text that had shaped medieval and Renaissance thinking about fate, power, and the equanimity needed to endure change. For Burne-Jones this was not mere antiquarian subject matter but a deeply personal meditation on mortality and the arbitrary nature of worldly status. He worked on the composition across a long gestation period, refining the monumental figures to an almost sculptural gravity that drew admiring comparisons to Michelangelo in his own lifetime. Its acquisition by a French national institution speaks to the esteem in which his work was held on the Continent, where the Aesthetic Movement and Symbolism found an enthusiastic audience. The painting stands as one of the defining statements of Victorian idealism in figurative art.

Oil on canvas at a large scale, enabling the monumental treatment of the three figures bound to the wheel. Burne-Jones employs a cool, silvery palette with deliberate echoes of Renaissance fresco tonality. The surface is worked to a smooth finish that emphasises the sculptural mass of the forms rather than painterly texture.