Thisbe

Thisbe takes its subject from the Babylonian legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, immortalized in Ovid's Metamorphoses and later reworked by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Thisbe is the survivor of the tragic pair—arriving at the mulberry tree to find Pyramus already dead, she takes her own life with his sword rather than live without him. Burne-Jones was drawn to stories of love and death united under the sign of beauty, and the Ovid myths provided him with inexhaustible material throughout his career. The Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, New Zealand, holds this canvas—an unusual location that reflects the nineteenth-century British diaspora's export of cultural objects, including Pre-Raphaelite and related Victorian art, to settler colonial institutions. For Burne-Jones, the subject's emotional content was less important than the opportunity it offered for depicting a beautiful, solitary female figure in extremity—grief transformed into aesthetic contemplation.

Oil on canvas employing Burne-Jones's characteristic cool, restrained palette and careful figure modeling. The compositional focus on a single female form in a landscape setting allowed for his characteristic approach of building emotional resonance through pose and expression rather than dramatic incident.