Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., ARA, RWS (British, 1833-1898)
The Answering String
signed with initials and dated 'E/B/J 18/96' (lower right), signed and inscribed with title (on artist's label attached to the reverse)
bodycolour, gold paint and coloured chalk
34.2 x 21.5cm (13 7/16 x 8 7/16in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
The artist.
With Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
(probably) H H Asquith, by 1899.
Thence by descent.
Private collection, UK.

Exhibited
Brussels, International Exhibition, British Fine Art Section, 1897, no. 182 (as property of the artist).
London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Drawings and Studies by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, 1899, no. 164, as Design in watercolour and gold, The Answering String (probably as property of H H Asquith).


A heavily draped female figure, her head covered, stands in an enclosed space beside a building of stone construction and with a single barred window. A woman stands in the foreground holding a dulcimer the strings of which she appears to pluck. The drawing's title – The Answering String – seems to imply that she has found a way to communicate with an unseen person who is held captive in a cell, by striking a note on her instrument and awaiting the reply.

The motif of a figure playing a stringed instrument occurs quite frequently in Burne-Jones's output. At the centre of the mural decoration that he made for William and Jane Morris's home, Red House, in 1860 is a man playing some kind of primitive fiddle; while the artist's composition, The Mill (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), begun in 1870, has a figure standing beneath an archway playing a dulcimer at the right side. Perhaps the most immediately familiar image of someone attempting to play an instrument in the context of Victorian art was George Frederic Watts's Hope (various versions, including that in the Tate commenced 1886), where the instrument has only one string remaining and yet which the figure persists in attempting to play.

In the last years of his life Burne-Jones completed a number of head studies and figurative compositions of this type using gold paint to make works of the utmost richness and ornamental quality, complete in themselves and intended for display as aesthetic objects. For example, in 1890, he showed a series of 'Designs in Gold' at the New Gallery. The Anniversary String was done in 1898, the year of the artist's death. Of the particular skill required in the use of gold paint, Burne-Jones told his assistant Thomas Matthews Rooke: 'This gold work must be done very directly – it's an art of itself. I forget how to do it between one time and another, and it's always an experiment'. (Mary Lago, Burne-Jones Talking, London, 1981, p. 143.)

We are grateful to Christopher Newall for compiling this catalogue entry.

The work appears in good colour and good condition.
Please note that this work has not been viewed out of its glazed frame.