PYGMALION & THE IMAGE
THE HEART DESIRES (1878)
† NCM 1900- 613-616
In this scene, Pygmalion contemplates his lonely existence. He is not looking at the living women in the doorway, or the statue of the three graces. Instead deep in thought, he ignores all the female forms, and looks instead at the floor.
The story of Pygmalion was adopted by a number of British artists and writers. In a patriarchal society vexed by the ‘woman question’, referring to an intellectual debate on the nature of women and feminist campaigns for social change after the 1700s, the idea of creating or moulding your own ideal woman would have appealed. This story was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ in 1913, which later became the basis for the 1956 Broadway musical ‘My Fair Lady’ by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe.
THE HAND REFRAINS (1878) Alone in his studio he carves the figure of a beautiful naked woman in marble and promptly falls in love with it. He prays to Venus to bring the sculpture to life. Here, Pygmalion is depicted admiring his work, and we can see the tools at the base of the statue used to carve out the female figure.
Derived from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, it tells of the sculptor Pygmalion who decides to remain celibate because of his disgust for what he considers to be the immorality of the young women of Cyprus. The sculptor creates his own ideal woman in the form of a statue, who is given life by the goddess Venus.
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THE GODHEAD FIRES (1878)
THE SOUL ATTAINS (1878)
In this scene Venus visits the statue and grants Pygmalion’s wish of bringing his statue to life. The statue becomes a young woman named Galatea whom Pygmalion marries. Venus is depicted floating above a pool of water to emphasise her divine power. Her delicate drapery accentuates Galatea’s vulnerability and nakedness. There are now also doves and flowers that were not previously present, as life has been brought to the studio. The similarity between the two female forms emphasises the notion of ideal beauty.
In the final scene, Pygmalion discovers his statue has come to life, and he kneels at her feet whilst she gazes off into the distance. Galatea evokes an air of mystery. The model for the statue, the dream woman, was his mistress Maria Zambaco. Maria was a sculptor herself, although her artistic reputation has virtually been forgotten. In Pygmalion Galatea is under the control of her creator, but Maria was the opposite, making demands upon Burne-Jones that he was unwilling or incapable of fulfilling. The entire series of the Pygmalion paintings was commissioned between 1875-78 by Euphrosyne Cassavetti, Maria Zambaco’s mother. With the title of each scene, Burne-Jones has created a poem: The Heart Desires, The Hand Refrains, The Godhead Fires, The Soul Attains.
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