Vesper

Vesper, executed in gouache in 1872, personifies the evening star — the planet Venus as it appears at dusk, the first and brightest light of the fading sky. The personification of evening as a feminine figure, holding or identified with a star or torch, belongs to a long tradition reaching through Renaissance allegory to classical antiquity. Burne-Jones's treatment in gouache on paper in 1872 belongs to a prolific period of work in this medium, when he was producing personification subjects in parallel with his larger oil commissions and his extensive design work for Morris and Company. The subject allowed him to explore the specific mood of threshold moments — the boundary between day and night, light and darkness, the warmth of day giving way to the cooler, more uncertain hour of evening. This is precisely the kind of mood-image — more atmospheric than narrative — that anticipates the Symbolist paintings of the following decade.

Gouache (opaque watercolour) on paper, with the flat, jewel-saturated colour that the medium enables. The evening subject allows Burne-Jones to work in a warm golden-amber palette shading to cooler blue-grey tones, encoding the transition between day and night through colour modulation rather than dramatic lighting.