The Wheel of Fortune (Burne-Jones)

The Wheel of Fortune is an oil painting on canvas by the British Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, made from 1875 to 1883.

The painting combines classical and medieval themes to present an allegory of the vagaries of life, a vanitas, with individual lives elevated or cast down as the wheel of fortune turns.

The tall frame is filled by a gigantic spoked wooden wheel, turned by a giant personification of the goddess Fortune standing in a contrapposto position, wrapped in the voluminous folds of a metallic blue classical gown, head swathed in a matching cloth, with closed eyes cast down.

The wheel and the figures fill most of the composition, but fragments of a wall and a tree can be seen in the top left, with a small patch of grey sky.

It is displayed in a heavy gilded tabernacle-style frame, a modern reconstruction based on fragments of the original, which has a decorative frieze with candelabrum ornament and egg and dart outer border, similar to those of other Burne-Jones paintings such as his Vespertina Quies (1893) in Tate Britain.