He came within the scarped cliff's purple shade, And found a woman standing lonely there, Naked, except for tresses of her hair That o'er her white limbs by the breeze were wound, And brazen chains her weary arms that bound Unto the sea-beat overhanging rock . . . On his way back to Seriphos, Perseus catches sight of Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus, King of Joppa, who has been offered as a sacrifice to the sea god Poseidon. Burne-Jones's original intention was to combine in one image the arrival of Perseus and his fight with the sea monster sent by Poseidon, and he worked on such a painting for several months in 1876. In a letter written in September of that year he describes the anguish of failing to achieve a satisfactory res- olution of the half that eventually became The Rock of Doom: I have worked solely at Andromeda and at last it begins to look what I wanted it to be — but all the sick weeks I worked at it when I ought to have done nothing nearly ruined it. You see I began to play with it and filled it with little houses and fields and roads, and walled gardens and mills, and bushes and winding shores and islands, and one day the veil was lifted and I saw how every pretty incident helped to ruin the thing, and I had three days of havoc at it and took them all out; and now in their place is a grey, doleful rock, but for the first time there is hope in the picture. It is folly to work when one cannot, and blasphemous to change one's first design. 1 Edward Burne-Jones, Perseus and Andromeda, begun 1876 (unfinished). Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 in. (152.2 x 229 cm). Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide The oil,' in which all the figures are nude, was taken close to completion and then abandoned. Burne-Jones seems to have started work on two separate canvases in the winter of 1884-85. In The Rock of Doom he rel- egates the elaborate cityscape to the background and conforms more to Morris's, verse, focusing on the moment at which Perseus reveals himself by removing his helmet of invisibility. The oil painting now at Stuttgart, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1888, is essentially identical, with the waves and rocks more neatly finished and with greater definition given to the build- ings in the right corner. 1. Memorials, vol. 2, pp. 68-69. Quoted from " Edward Burne-Jones Victorian Artist Dreamer" p 230-231
Two of the illustrations for the projected edition of Morris's The Earthly Paradise, have been incorporated into a single painting. In the Fitzwilliam sketchbook 1070-2, in which a list of the proposed illustrations appears on page 77 verso, numbers 17 and 19 "Unchaining Andromeda - A. naked" and "Fight with beast" are the earliest mention of these designs. By the time this painting was executed the idea had been clarified and not to abandon an idea Burne-Jones felt worthy of further development, the present oil was begun c.1876. It is most probable that when Balfour visited the Studio and admired the painting, a proposal of a mural scheme arose, one had already begun based upon the Cupid and Psyche Series at Palace Green for George Howard, from the illustrations also to Morris's story in The Earthly Paradise, so that it was natural for Burne-Jones to suggest a set of paintings derived from that scheme of illustration. It became a practice for Burne-Jones to work closely with his patrons, allowing him to develop a project that had already existed in his mind, thus solving the problem of finding a client and eliminating financial concerns at the same time.