L’Espérance

1896 was a hard year for Burne-Jones. William Morris, his closest friend since their student days and his partner in decades of work, was dying, and would be gone by the autumn. An American patron in Massachusetts had asked him for a cheerful painting of a dancing girl. He could not bring himself to it. He wrote to ask whether he might paint Hope instead, and she came out like this, a woman shut in a bare stone cell, an iron shackle on her ankle, pushing a branch of apple blossom up toward a thin strip of blue sky. He based her on a figure he had first drawn years earlier for a stained-glass window of the Christian virtues.