This is a fine example of a particular type of Burne-Jones's exotic late drawings, in gold on a black ground, like "the colour of a black poppy" he had admired in a Byzantine Gospel book (see cat. no. 167). Along with another, similar drawing, also formerly in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 1 it takes up one of the artist's abiding delights, the effect of clinging drapery on female figures, which he so admired in early Renaissance art. In 1871, responding to a catalogue of photographs sent to him by Charles Eliot Norton, he had enthused over Ghirlandaio s "sweet girls running, and their dresses blown about," 2 and on his trip to Italy two years later he had made careful studies of such figures in the fifteenth-century inlaid-marble floor of Siena Cathedral. 3 Further notes on similar images can be found in a sketchbook, which he particularly prized, recording visits to the Print Room of the British Museum, probably in the 1880s. 4 Other fruits of this long-term study appear in designs for the Kelmscott Chaucer, such as the dancing girls in the Garden of Mirth, from the Romaunt of the Rose. The second drawing of Girls Dancing, in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, was used by Robert Catterson-Smith, Burne-Jones s protege and helper with the Kelmscott Chaucer designs, as the model for one of two repousse silver plaques shown at the fifth exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1896. 5 Burne-Jones returned to the theme for the last time in a six- figure design of Girls Dancing, in bodycolor and gold on a blue ground, dated 1898. 6 1. Lady Lever Art Gallery 1948, no. 62, illus. 2. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 21. 3. Robinson 1975a, p. 348, figs. 2, 4. 4. Wightwick Manor (The National Trust, WIG/D/180); the inscription on the front endpaper — "Whoever brings this to the above address [The Grange] shall be rewarded to the amount of one guinea" — is a reminder that Burne-Jones happily, if surprisingly, left sketchbooks for visitors to look at in the studio. 5. Catalogue of the Fifth Exhibition (exh. cat., London: Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 1896) nos. 109, no, reproduced in Studio 9 (1896), p. 119. 6. Sotheby's, June 23, 1981, lot 98.