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Cumbrian Painting In The Tate |
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Sunday, 13 April 2008 |
 One of the most important pre-Raphaelite paintings, originally commissioned to hang in a Cumbrian castle, has gone on display at the Tate.
It’s the first time in over 40 years that Edward Burne-Jones's The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon has been installed in a British gallery.
It was commissioned by the artist’s patron George Howard, the Earl of Carlisle, to hang in Naworth castle but he never completed the work.
The six-metre-wide painting, Burne-Jones's crowning achievement, which took up 18 years of his life, is an unlikely star of the Caribbean and has hung in a specially designed room at the Museo de Arte de Ponce on the south coast of Puerto Rico since 1965.
Virtually unknown in the UK it had been bought at auction two years earlier for 1,600 guineas, by the island's governor, Don Luis Ferré who created the museum and embarked on a ferocious collecting spree, building up an impressive collection of British art.
The work, which depicts the mortally wounded Arthur on the magical island of Avalon surrounded by a cast of queens, Amazons and watchers, became an obsession of the artist and was based on hundreds of studies over the years.
It was loaned to the Tate in 1929 and, because of its size, was displayed on a rear staircase. When the Tate had the chance to buy it for what, with hindsight, seems an absurdly low price, it declined.
It is being loaned to the Tate for two years while the Puerto Rican museum is refurbished.
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