The Love Song

Sir Edward Burne-Jones associated this painting with a refrain from a Breton folk ballad: "Alas, I know a love song, / Sad or happy, each in turn." The artist conjured a twilight scene with a richly romantic, medieval air, enhanced by allusions to Italian Renaissance art, from the warm, dewy colors to the gracious figures and original frame, which recalls sixteenth-and-seventeenth-century Venetian designs. When the picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1878, the novelist Henry James compared it to "some mellow Giorgione or some richly-glowing Titian."

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