The present oil sketch is a study for the figure of Nimuë in Burne-Jones's celebrated painting The Beguiling of Merlin (1874, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, fig. 1), one of a group of eight works Burne-Jones exhibited at the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1877. The picture was commissioned by Burne-Jones's great patron F.R Leyland (1831-1892) for the famous interior he created at 49 Prince's Gate, London.

The Grosvenor Gallery was established as an alternative to the Royal Academy by Sir Coutts Lindsay (1824-1915) and set itself apart from mainstream exhibiting societies. It was more a private organisation defined in terms of distinction and the artists it promoted embodied this rarified identity. The pictures were hung (in contrast to the Royal Academy) in an aesthetic hang which embraced the ideal of 'art for art's sake'. Burne-Jones's exhibits, displayed on scarlet damask, shone out and marked him out as a leader of the new aesthetic sensibility.  For Burne-Jones his debut at the inaugural Grosvenor Gallery exhibition marked a triumphal return to public exhibition after a break of seven years when he resigned from the Old Water Colour Society in 1870 after a member of the public complained about the nudity in Phyllis and Demophoon (Birmingham Museums Trust).

The Beguiling of Merlin is based on the late Medieval French text Le Roman de Merlin. Merlin and Nimuë was one of Burne-Jones' favourite Arthurian themes. He discovered a copy of the 1817 edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur in a Birmingham bookshop in 1855, and painted an Arthurian subject in a mural for the old Debating Hall of the Oxford Union in 1857. He also executed a watercolour of the same subject in 1861 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London).  In the story Merlin was so in love with Nimuë that at her request he taught her all his magic skills, which she wrote down. The picture depicts the moment when snake crowned Nimuë has lulled the magician to his doom, enchanting Merlin with his own sorcery by binding him into a hawthorn tree. Merlin is shown paralysed and helpless and the subject matter symbolising entrapment in which a male protagonist falls victim to a hidden, threatening female power. 

Like so many paintings at this date, there is an autobiographical element to his representation of the subject. The model for Nimuë, who we see in the present picture, was Maria Zambaco (1843-1914), a married Grecian beauty with whom Burne-Jones conducted a passionate affair. Maria was wayward, headstrong and artistically talented (she later made her name as a sculptor), but also ravishingly beautiful, with dark eyes, red hair and pale skin and represented in human form the classical Greek ideal that Burne-Jones was looking for in his work in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

Maria's maiden name was Cassavetti and she was a cousin of the Ionides, the important Anglo-Greek family who played a seminal role in the annals of Victorian art. In 1861 she married Demetrius Zambaco, a doctor serving the Greek community in Paris, but four years later, having borne him two children, left him and returned with her offspring to London. In 1867 at the age of twenty-three she was introduced to Burne-Jones, her senior by ten years. Their relationship was often reflected in a symbolic way in Burne-Jones's work, his paintings from this date illustrating the power of love and its enchantment, for example Love among the Ruins (private collection) and Phyllis and Demophoön. In a letter of 1893 to Helen Mary Gaskell, Burne-Jones wrote that, 'the head of Nimuë in the picture called The Enchanting of Merlin was painted from the same poor traitor and was very like - all the action is like - the name of her was Mary. Now isn't that very funny as she was born at the foot of Olympus and looked and was primaeval and that's the head and the way of standing and turning . . . and I was being turned into a hawthorn bush in the forest of Broceliande - every year when the hawthorn buds it is the soul of Merlin trying to live again in the world and speak - for he left so much unsaid.'

The emotional turmoil of their relationship put a severe strain on Burne-Jones's health, and the affair reached a climax in January 1869, when Maria tried to commit suicide in Regent's Canal, London. Restrained by her lover, she failed, and the relationship continued at a less feverish pace until well into the 1870s, perhaps even later.

The painting was conceived possibly as early as 1870 and Burne-Jones started work in 1872 just after his highly influential third visit to Italy in 1871 which had an enormous impact on his work in terms of style, inventiveness and productivity. He worked on it extensively in 1875, finishing it in 1877. In 1878 it was sent to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the first time Burne-Jones' work had been seen abroad. The critic F.G. Stephens, reviewing the finished painting at the Grosvenor Gallery's exhibition wrote 'Nimue's face in its snaky intensity of malice is marvellous...' 

The present work may be a sketch for the first version of the painting which Burne-Jones was forced to abandon. Lady Burne Jones in her Memorials quotes a letter Burne Jones wrote to his patron F.R. Leyland regarding the trouble he had had with the first version, 'with 'Merlin' I'm in a miserable plight; not with the design but with the damnable paint, which seems everywhere insecure...there are spots innumerable on it where the paint will not bite the canvas, and where eventually it will chip off and shew ruinous gaps.' She continued, 'An entry in his work for 1873 records: 'Began 'Merlin and Nimue' afresh.' A version, presumably the one noted as being abandoned because the paint would not adhere to the canvas, appears in a photograph of Burne-Jones's Garden Studio published in The Magazine of Art, 1900, p.166 (current whereabouts unknown).  The letter suggests that the canvas was abandoned at a later stage in its development than the present work. Pencil studies for The Beguiling of Merlin are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Bancroft Collection at Wilmington, Delaware, and elsewhere. 

When the oil sketch last appeared at auction in 1976, the Burne-Jones scholar William Waters noted that it is 'a fragment of a studio version of The Beguiling of Merlin, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, possibly executed in part by Burne Jones himself. It corresponds closely to the finished composition, but is only partially completed.'  The use of studio assistants was not an uncommon practice amongst Pre-Raphaelite artists. Burne-Jones saw himself as the master of a busy workshop, based on the medieval and Renaissance models, with assistants playing an essential part in the production of his works. From 1866/7 Burne-Jones employed two permanent studio assistants, Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919) and Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942). Murray left to travel to Italy in the winter of 1871, and Burne-Jones enlisted the services of Rooke, in addition, there may have been up to six or seven studio assistants employed at any one time. Burne-Jones considered that all works issued by the studio were by him and this is what he advised his son, Philip, to adopt when he sold the contents of the studio. The present work has been catalogued as Burne-Jones and studio acknowledging the preparatory nature of the work and the different levels of finish to the sitter's head.

Auction Details

Tuesday 2 June 2026, 10.30am BST
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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