Study for "Danae"

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt ARA (1833-1898)

Black and white chalk on brown paper

14 1/2 x 9 3/4 inches, 35 x 15.2 centimetres.

Provenance: David Posner since 1980

"Burne-Jones first treated the subject of Danae in a watercolour of 1863 (destroyed)." Danae was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos. He was warned in an oracle that her son would kill him so he shut her up in a brazen tower. Burne-Jones has depicted Danae watching the building of the tower, and derived three paintings from his unfinished illustration in Morris' Earthly Paradise tale, the Doom of Acrisius (1868). There are today in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the The Fogg Art Museum, [Harvard University], Cambridge, Massaschusetts, and the Glasgow Art Gallery. The present drawing is for the last and largest of these in Glasgow" (Waters, p. 58).

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