this highly finished watercolour by Edward Burne-Jones depicts a subject from the story of Sir Tristram de Lyones, one of the books in Sir Thomas Malory’s epic about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
It is painted over a ‘cartoon’ for a stained-glass window which was part of an 1862 commission from Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co by the industrialist Walter Dunlop to provide 13 stained-glass panels to decorate his Yorkshire home.
The adventures of Sir Tristram were chosen and six artists were employed to create designs with Burne-Jones contributing four of them. Three, including this one, The Madness of Sir Tristram, were then worked up into independent watercolours. The resultant glass panels are now in Bradford City Art Gallery. The 23 x 22in (58 x 56cm) work, in watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gum arabic and gold and signed with initials lower left, has been extensively exhibited and will appear in Sotheby’s January 25 auction of Old Master drawings with an estimate of $350,000-450,000.