Being a designer and painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Edward Burne Jones worked as a designer of a wide range of crafts including ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, and mosaics. The composition of 'The Wheel of Fortune' is dominated by a giant spoked wooden wheel that fills the tall canvas from top to bottom, turned by a colossal personification of the goddess Fortune. She stands in a contrapposto pose, wrapped in the heavy folds of a metallic blue classical gown, her head covered in matching cloth, eyes closed and cast down. Her closed eyes mean she looks at no one, that is, Lady Fortune refuses to be accountable for the fate of the men on her wheel, giving the painting a mood of instability and resigned despair. According to the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti- “If a man have any poetry in him he should have paint, for it has all been said and sung, but they have hardly begun to paint it." This painting, somehow is an extension of this belief.
The palette is deliberately dull with the dominance of greys, browns, greens and blues which further reinforces the painting's somber, fatalistic tone of despair. Fortune towers over the men, fully clothed and needing only to rest a hand on the wheel to spin it, while the much smaller, naked figures writhe helplessly, seeming to tumble toward a precipice against an almost lunar landscape. Edward Burne Jones began this painting in 1871, and it was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1883.
I interpret The Wheel of Fortune as a powerful meditation on the uncertainty and lack of control that people experience in life. The enormous Fortune dominates the smaller human figures, suggesting that wealth, status and personal achievement can all be changed by forces beyond an individual's control. The slave, king and poet represent different positions in society, yet all are equally vulnerable to the movement of the wheel. The upward and downward movement of the figures suggests that success and failure are temporary conditions rather than permanent states. The restrained colours and tightly packed composition create an oppressive atmosphere, reinforcing the sense of inevitability and fate. For me, the painting represents the fragile nature of human life and the idea that fortune can elevate or destroy people without regard to their social position.
