The Beguiling of Merlin (Merlin and Vivien) 1874

Edward Burne-Jones created The Beguiling of Merlin using oil on canvas, a traditional medium elevated to new heights in the Victorian era. The texture of the paint is so smooth, it’s easy to forget this is oil at all. It’s been blended almost to the point of invisibility, allowing the forms – Merlin, slumped and spellbound, and the sorceress Vivien reading from her book – to emerge with hallucinatory clarity. Note the whiplash curves of the snake winding through the scene, an almost gratuitous virtuoso passage of rendering. The Pre-Raphaelites like Burne-Jones were deeply invested in labor, both celebrating its skilled application and, perhaps, covering up their anxiety about the rise of industry. It took considerable time and no little expertise to achieve this quality of surface, to create such a captivating scene. Considering the time-intensive craft involved reminds us that even a painting like this one, so seemingly removed from the concerns of everyday life, is in fact deeply embedded in the social realities of its time.