L'albero del perdono

Burne-Jones had painted this myth once before, in 1870, and it had gone badly. That earlier watercolour showed Demophoon naked, and the model for the clinging Phyllis was widely recognised as Maria Zambaco, the woman with whom the married artist had recently had a very public affair. The picture was pulled from its London exhibition and Burne-Jones resigned from the society that had shown it. Eleven years later he came back to the same story in oil. Phyllis, abandoned and dead, has been turned into an almond tree, and bursts alive out of its trunk to seize the returning Demophoon, whose face is caught somewhere between longing and alarm. The blossom breaking from the bare wood is the almond, the first tree to flower in a Greek spring.