It was originally intended that there should be ten paintings; they had been commissioned by Arthur Balfour for the music room of his London house, and Burne-Jones produced a set of elaborate designs showing how the framed paintings would be integrated into the interior, including the chimneypiece and door, and how their wider setting would extend to a ground of scrolling acanthus (either of stucco or wallpaper), to be provided by Morris & Co. Sadly, this scheme was never completed, and the finished paintings in Stuttgart were framed at some point in the Venetian ‘swan’s head’ pattern. In the designs, above, however, the fully coloured paintings were to be framed in gilded and fluted mouldings – very similar in profile to the frames on the gouache cartoons for the Perseus Cycle now in Southampton (see below), but completely gilded, rather than black and parcel-gilt. The low-relief gilded and silvered images in gesso on oak panels [34], which fitted over the door and chimneypiece and in the centre of the third wall, were to have had completely plain, flat borders. Both types of frame were evidently designed to provide a resting place between the paintings and the acanthus background. It is not clear when the Stuttgart pictures were given the Renaissance-style ‘swan’s head’ frames, but presumably their pierced, scrolling pattern was a replacement for the acanthus walls in the failed commission. The Frame Blog