The Bridge

In 1898 the Royal Academy in London elected Abbey a full member, and that same year this canvas went on show there. It is one of the scenes from an imagined old England that he was known for. A jester with a lute sits on the parapet of a stone bridge while a line of monks passes by, and a castle rises behind them at dusk. The first owner was George Howard, Earl of Carlisle, a painter himself and a close friend of Burne-Jones, who bought it from Abbey that year. In 1903 Lord Carlisle gave it to the national art gallery in Cape Town, and it stayed in South Africa for more than a century. The gallery kept it until May 1947, when it was sold at a public auction on Long Street in Cape Town as the first lot of the day. A Johannesburg businessman, Alfred Henry Stodel, known as Jimmy, bought it, and in 1980 it passed to his son John. The Museum of Fine Arts bought it from the family in 2008.