tempera & gilt on gesso on panel.

"The garden of the Hesperides interested Burne-Jones over a period of time and he made more than one composition of the subject. He made his first designs for a composition of the Hesperides subject in connection with the plan to illustrate Morris’s The Earthly Paradise in an illustrated book in the late 1860s. This was not carried out but some drawings remain (three drawings of ‘feeding the serpent’ exist in the Witt Library of the Courtauld Institute in London). Another composition of the garden in its peaceful state was executed in The Garden of the Hesperides (1869-73; Hamburger Kunsthalle), and another of the same composition and title (1877; private collection) where the three Hesperides dance around the tree with Ladon sinuously coiled around it. In the V&A’s painting The Garden of the Hesperides (1882) Burne-Jones has reduced the number of daughters to two, apparently in the interests of symmetry. It provides an example of his interest in classical form, especially in the treatment of the background and in the shapes of the ewer and harp. The scene is represented in low relief. Platinum, a white metal, was used in addition to the more common gold leaf in the gilding."