Sidonia von Bork 1560

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

1860

Watercolor and gouache on paper

Support: 333 × 171 mm frame: 471 × 310 × 49 mm

Collection: Tate, ref. no. NO5877

Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson, 1948

One of Burne-Jones's earliest watercolours, this depicts a beautiful but duplicitous woman, decked in richly patterned Renaissance costume, but destined for execution — the eponymous protagonist of Wilhelm Meinhold's gothic romance of 1848, Sidonia the Sorceress. At present, her sly sideways look suggests an element of danger to others....

Image kindly released by the Tate under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED licence. Click on the image to enlarge it.