Spoilt for curatorial choice
Sally-Anne Huxtable, head curator
Idleness and the Pilgrim of Love by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, about 1872–76, at Wallington, Northumberland
Burne-Jones was deeply inspired by , a 13th-century French poem of courtly love by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and Chaucer’s 14th-century translation of it, . The poem is an allegorical dream vision, a pilgrim’s quest for perfect love, which he eventually achieves in the form of a woman in the form of a rose bush inside the Garden of Desire. Here, in this pastel and watercolour, executed over an earlier cartoon in pencil, the pilgrim is tested by Idleness in the form of another beautiful woman. Themes of quest and idealised love were ones to which the artist returned time and again through
