Philip Burne-Jones, the only surviving son of the artist and his wife Georgiana, was born on 2 October 1861 and entered Marlborough college, the school of his father's lifelong friend William Morris, in 1874. He later became a painter, specialising in small-scale portraits. His father, his uncle Edward Poynter, his cousin Rudyard Kipling, and Henry James, were among his sitters. For a character study, see Angela Thirkell, Three Houses, 1931, pp. 66-8. In this drawing he is clearly older than in the comparable pencil study made on 12 January 1878, when he was seventeen, which is reproduced in Lady Burne-Jones's Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1904, II, facing p. 90. His appearance is nearer to that in the unfinished painting of the artist's family begun in Ocotber 1879 (ibid, facing p. 106), or even to the likeness of him painting in the background of Burne-Jones's well-known portrait of Georgiana begun in 1883 (repr. Burne-Jones, Arts Council exh., 1975-6, cat. p. 77)
Burne-Jones’s biographer Fiona MacCarthy (The Last Pre-Raphaelite, p 134) wrote that soon after Burne-Jones’s son Philip was born in 1861, his proud father related that their friends thought him ‘the prettiest boy known’ and that ‘Phil was to remain pretty, somewhat to his detriment’. This drawing was done when Philip was at Marlborough, a ‘particularly brutal boys’ public school’ (MacCarthy, p 259). William Morris had been to the same school and had been deeply unhappy, holding that he learned nothing there, because nothing was being taught. When the day came for Philip to leave for school, Burne-Jones could hardly bear it and wrote to Rosalind Howard, ‘Today I carry Phil off to Marlborough and come back I suppose tomorrow. There are red eyes all up and down the house and Georgie is giving way in a manner unworthy of her Roman virtue’ (ALS September 1874, Castle Howard). MacCarthy described Phil’s four years at Marlborough as ‘a terrible ordeal for a nervous, spoilt and beautiful boy’ (p 259). The delicate technique of this drawing, which is so fine that it was once mis-catalogued as a silverpoint, suits the sensitivity of the sitter.