King Cophetua and the Stolen Gold: Edward Burne-Jones’s Reflections on Looting
This talk will reassess one of the best-known paintings by English artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884), investigating how the picture reflects on English looting and the larger economics of empire. The painting takes as its subject a sixteenth-century ballad about an African king which Alfred Tennyson had reworked in his 1842 poem “The Beggar-Maid.” I suggest that while other Victorian artists illustrating the Cophetua story ignored its African setting, Burne-Jones’s eclectic neo-Renaissance scene pointedly draws from London displays of Ethiopian and Asante metalwork stolen by English forces during the Siege of Magdala (1868) and the Sacking of Kumasi (1874) respectively. Contextualized within the discourses and visual culture of the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid emerges as a forceful (if ultimately limited) critique of imperial values.