The Mill (Burne-Jones painting)

The Mill is an Aesthetic Movement, Renaissance-inspired oil on canvas painting completed by Edward Burne-Jones in 1882. The painting's main feature is three women dancing in front of a mill pond on a summer evening, with a vague wooded landscape spanning the background. The Mill is an oil on canvas painting. It is 91 centimetres (36 in) in height, and 197 centimetres (78 in) in width.[1]

The Mill
ArtistSir Edward Burne-Jones
Completion date1882
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions91 cm × 197 cm (36 in × 78 in)[1]
LocationVictoria and Albert Museum, London

Edward Burne-Jones took twelve years to complete The Mill, starting work in 1870[1] and completing it in 1882.[2] Shortly after its completion, the painting was displayed at an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery.[3] The Mill was inspired by The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a mural painted by Italian Renaissance artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti between 1338 and 1340.[4] The dancing women in the painting were modelled upon women known to Burne-Jones personally: from left to right, Aglaia Coronio, Marie Stillman, and Maria Zambaco.[5] Aglaia was the daughter of Constantine Ionides, who, like Burne-Jones, was interested in art. Marie was a painter,[3] and Maria was Ionides' granddaughter.[6] At the time, Maria was Burne-Jones' mistress.[3]

The Mill is a vague and mysterious painting with no particular meaning.[3] It incorporates styles from the Aesthetic Movement and the Renaissance.[6] In the painting, three women wearing simple, Renaissance-style aesthetic dresses[3] are dancing in a garden on a summer evening. On the right of the dancing women, a musician of an indiscernible gender is standing under a loggia.[1][6] A mill pond can be seen behind the women.[6] On the other side of the pond, there are several nude men, who are presumably swimming. In the background is an unspecific landscape consisting of various designs and types of architecture.[1]

Ownership

Constantine Ionides bought the painting on 21 April 1882 for £905.[6] It is currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London.[2]

gollark: Maybe someone actually *has* been insane enough to make GCC able to compile to LLVM, who knows.
gollark: Oh, right. That would have been easier than doing it by hand.
gollark: Did you just randomly decide to calculate that?
gollark: Well, you can, or also "it would have about the same mass as the atmosphere".
gollark: Wikipedia says that spider silk has a diameter of "2.5–4 μm", which I approximated to 3μm for convenience, so a strand has a 1.5μm radius. That means that its cross-sectional area (if we assume this long thing of spider silk is a cylinder) is (1.5e-6)², or ~7e-12. Wikipedia also says its density is about 1.3g/cm³, which is 1300kg/m³, and that the observable universe has a diameter of 93 billion light-years (8.8e26 meters). So multiply the length of the strand (the observable universe's diameter) by the density of spider silk by the cross-sectional area of the strand and you get 8e18 kg, while the atmosphere's mass is about 5e18 kg, so close enough really.

See also

References
  1. Patrick Bade (22 December 2011). Burne-Jones. Parkstone International. pp. 33, 36. ISBN 978-1-78042-414-9.
  2. "Study of a Dancing Woman for 'The Mill' c.1870–82". tate.org.uk. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  3. Kimberly Wahl (2013). Dressed As in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform. UPNE. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-61168-415-5.
  4. "Portrait of Marie Spartali, Mrs W. J. Stillman (England, c.1880)". leicestergalleries.com. Retrieved 22 February 2015.
  5. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. Harvard University Press. Mar 5, 2012. pp. 203–204. ISBN 9780674065796.
  6. "The Mill: Girls Dancing to Music by a River". collections.vam.ac.uk. Retrieved 25 February 2015.

Further reading
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