Laus Veneris

Description

Look closely at the surface first, before the subject even settles into focus. The paint here is built in close, muted layers of crimson, gold, and smoked rose, laid on with a patience that lets each tone show through the next rather than sitting flat on top of it. Edges dissolve into one another rather than snapping into hard outline, so the whole picture seems to breathe with a warm, enclosed light, the kind that gathers in a chamber hung with heavy drapery rather than falling in from outdoors.

About Laus Veneris

Out of this handling the subject arrives slowly: Venus enthroned, attended by women whose faces and gestures carry the same unhurried gravity as the paint itself. Burne-Jones drew the theme from the old legend of Tannhauser, the knight bound to the goddess in her mountain, and he treats it not as a narrative to be read quickly but as a mood to be entered. Behind the foreground figures, a frieze of tapestry and a glimpse of tournament knights link inner longing to outer world, a device typical of his mature work of the 1870s, when he was moving away from the crisp Pre-Raphaelite line of his youth toward something denser and more dreamlike.

Colour is compressed rather than contrasted; reds and golds are pressed close together in value so the eye has to work to separate them, and that compression is exactly what gives the picture its smouldering, interior quality. The brushwork thickens in the drapery and softens almost to nothing in the flesh, a contrast you can trace across the whole composition if you follow it panel by panel.

To bring that into a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, our painters work the same way Burne-Jones did, building colour in successive layers rather than mixing a single flat tone and setting it down once. They match his compressed palette stroke by stroke, let the drapery carry real impasto, and keep the transitions between figures soft where his were soft, so what reaches you is a hand-painted replica with the same weight of surface, not a flat copy of it. Every canvas is worked by hand from start to finish, which is why no two impressions of the same brushstroke are ever quite identical.

The hand-painted reproduction

Here is what you receive with your reproduction:

• A hand-painted oil on canvas, not a printed copy
• A choice of sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation, ready to hang
• A certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered to you in 5 to 7 days