Cupid's Hunting Fields

Sir Edward Burne-Jones · 1885

Medium

Gouache, with watercolor and gold and silver paints on ivory wove paper, laid down on linen canvas

Original size

99.5 × 76.9 cm (39 3/16 × 30 5/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Cupid's Hunting Fields draws the eye into a hushed, golden world where love is cast not as a gentle force but as something wilder — a hunt across a dream-lit landscape populated by captive souls. Burne-Jones painted this in 1885 at the height of his powers, working in gouache heightened with watercolor and actual gold and silver paints on ivory wove paper — a technique that gives the surface an almost luminous, medieval quality quite unlike conventional oil painting. He was the defining figure of the British Aesthetic Movement, and this work shows why: the elongated figures, the cool palette suddenly warmed by metallic accents, and the mood of suspended mythological time are entirely his own. Where his Pre-Raphaelite peers often reached for narrative drama, Burne-Jones reached for atmosphere. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago and is considered one of the finer examples of his work in mixed decorative media, a format he returned to repeatedly throughout the 1880s. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the refined delicacy of the original into the deeper, richer tones that oil on canvas naturally produces — preserving the ethereal mood Burne-Jones intended while giving the image the physical presence it deserves on a wall.