This attractive example of Burne-Jones's middle period is an important rediscovery. Though mentioned in his autograph work-record, included in his memorial exhibition at the New Gallery in 1898-9, and illustrated in the magnificent elephant-folio volume of photogravures of his work published in a limited edition by the Berlin Photographic Company in 1901, it has eluded all the more recent literature and has not been reproduced since it belonged to the dealer David Croal Thomson in 1929. It was sold in New York in 1950, and remained in an American private collection until last year. There are two references in Burne-Jones's own work-record, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In 1875 he notes that he has 'worked...at a small picture of two girls with a viol and a scroll of music'; and the following year he adds: 'two girls with viol and scroll, in red and green dresses. Sold to aforesaid Benjamin'. The picture was clearly started in 1875 and completed in 1876, the date still just discernible in its lower left corner. The 'aforesaid Benjamin' is identified as 'one Benjamin an Israelite' who also bought in 1875-6 the small triptych of Pyramus and Thisbe, painted in watercolour on vellum, which is now in the Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead. There are no other references to this patron in the record, and it is possible that he was a dealer. Certainly both Music (the name given to our picture by the time it appeared in the memorial exhibition in 1898) and Pyramus and Thisbe had changed hands, possibly more than once, by the turn of the century. In 1877 Burne-Jones painted another verison of Music, virtually identical in size to the original. He entered it in his work-record for this year as follows: 'finished replica of two girls with viol and scroll. Graham'. This means that it was executed for William Graham, the wealthy India merchant and Liberal member for Glasgow who was his most important patron, and who would often commission a version of a composition he particularly admired. The picture was not among the thirty-four examples of Burne-Jones's work which appeared in the five-day sale of the Graham collection at Christie's in April 1886, but by 1895 it belonged to Stephen T. Gooden, possibly of the firm of picture dealers Gooden and Fox, who lent it to the annual exhibition of pictures at the Guildhall in the City of London that year. The catalogue description shows how it both duplicated and differed from the original. 'A seated figure, myrtle-wreathed, and clad in purple, is holding an open scroll of music from which another standing by, robed in crimson, and playing a stringed instrument, is reading. From the low balcony a rich landscape is seen, with hills, and a castle, the warm evening light suffusing the scene.' Clearly the main difference lay in the girl holding the scroll, who had acquired a wreath in her hair while her dress had been changed from green to purple. It is possible that these alterations were requested by Graham. When the second version is next heard of it was in the collection of Joseph Beausire of Wethersfield, Noctorum, Birkenhead, who lent it to the International Exhibition at Glasgow in 1901 (Fine Art Section: Deceased British Artists (Oil), no. 301). Following Beausire's death, it was sold at Christie's on 13 April 1934 (lot 33) and bought for £147 by Gooden and Fox, not because they had owned it before (if indeed they had) but because they had been commisssioned by Kerrison Preston. A Bournemouth solicitor, Preston was one of a group of connoisseurs who, against the current of fashion, maintained an interest in the Pre-Raphaelites, their associates and followers, during the interwar period. He formed a large collection of pictures of which the best known is Choosing, G.F. Watts's portrait of his child wife Ellen Terry, now in the National Portrait Gallery. Music has been the subject of a good deal of confusion. Our version was described as a watercolour when it was listed by De Lisle in 1904, although it had been correctly identified as an oil in Malcolm Bell's earlier monograph and when exhibited at the New Gallery in 1898-9. Still more mysteriously, Algernon Graves called it a 'drawing' when he recorded its appearance in the memorial exhibition. Its provenance has also been misunderstood. Croal Thomson, publishing it in his Illustrated Record for 1929, the year he acquired it at the Benson sale at Christie's and exhibited it at Barbizon House, his gallery in Henrietta Street off Cavendish Square, wrote that it was 'painted in 1875 for Mrs R.H. Benson'. He was clearly jumping to conclusions, having probably read the entry in the memorial exhibition catalogue ('Painted in 1875. Lent by Mrs R.H. Benson') and being unaware that Burne-Jones had sold it to the 'aforesaid Benjamin'. Inevitably there has been some confusion between the two versions. They would be easier to identify if they had differed in size, but all the references suggest that they were very similar in format, as well as both being an oil. When Kerrison Preston bought his version in 1934, the acquisition naturally interested his friend Graham Robertson, who had known Burne-Jones well and watched with dismay as his reputation declined. On 16 June 1934, three days after the Beausire sale at Christie's, Robertson 'vetted' the picture for Preston at Gooden and Fox's gallery and declared it to be 'a quite straightforward oil painting'; but he subsequently mentioned it to Margaret and J. W. Mackail, Burne-Jones's daughter and son-in-law, who 'could add nothing to the Mrs R. H. Benson story except that they were sure it was a watercolour' (Kerrison Preston (ed.), Letters from Graham Robertson, 1953, pp. 310, 312). Perhaps they had looked the picture up in De Lisle, seen our version described as a watercolour with a Benson provenance, and assumed that this was Preston's purchase. No-one seems to have realised that there were two versions. True, the work-record, mentioning them both, had been in the Fitzwilliam since 1921, given by Margaret herself and Sir Philip Burne-Jones, her brother; but it was only five years since the original version had gone through Christie's and been bought by Croal Thomson, a dealer much patronised by the circle of collectors to which Preston belonged. Indeed Preston himself bought Choosing from Thomson only two months after he secured the second version of Music at Christie's. In one thing Croal Thomson was right: Mrs Benson's 'husband was a personal friend of [Burne-Jones] and one who at various times was the owner of many fine pictures, both of the Pre-Raphaelite and of the old Italian schools'. Robert Henry Benson (1850-1929), or Robin Benson as he was always known, was the son-in-law of Robert Stayner Holford (1808-1892), marrying his daughter Evelyn in 1887. Holford needs no introduction as one of the greatest connoisseurs of his day. A multimillionaire from an early age, due to the late fruition of an old family investment and the romantic discovery of bullion on the estate of an uncle in the Isle of Wight, he built up a magnificent collection which Waagen, writing in 1853, described as second only to that of the Marquis of Hertford and displaying 'a far greater universality of taste.' It included superb paintings of the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French and English schools, the choicest illuminated manuscripts, an unrivalled collection of Rembrandt etchings, and many other works of art. Holford was as much a builder as a collector. In the 1840s he acquired Dorchester House in Park Lane, and began to remodel it as an Italian palazzo to designs by Lewis Vulliamy. By a similar process he subsequently transformed Westonbirt, the family's Cotswold country seat. The two houses provided the background to their owner's princely collection, much of which was dispersed at Christie's in 1927, following the death of Sir George Holford, Robert Holford's eldest son. Robert and Evelyn Benson, who collected very much in tandem, were in the same tradition. By profession Benson was a successful merchant banker. Going into partnership with George Eliot's husband, John Cross, he built up a flourishing firm by astute financing of railways and electrical projects; long after his death it was to merge with a rival bank to form Kleinwort Benson in 1961 (see Jehanne Wake, Kleinwort Benson: The history of two families in banking, 1997). In London Benson lived for many years at 16 South Street, a stone's throw from Dorchester House, but towards the end of his life he moved to Walpole House, Chiswick Mall, where he died. Buckhurst Park at Withyham, Sussex, was his country retreat. As a collector, he was interested in modern pictures and Chinese porcelain, but he was best known for his Italian Old Masters. These were indeed remarkable, including examples of many of the greatest artists of the early and high Renaissance which today are among the most prized possessions of museums, particularly in America. Four panels from Duccio's celebrated Maestà, completed for Siena Cathedral in 1311 (National Gallery, Washington, Frick Collection, New York, and elsewhere), were only one of his greatest treasures. Benson was a pillar of the art establishment, a Trustee of the National Gallery and the Tate, a member of the council of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a leading light in the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and treasurer of the fledgling National Art-Collections Fund. He also ventured into print as an art-historian. His first publication was a catalogue of an exhibition of Ferrarese paintings organised by the BFAC in 1894. This was followed by catalogues of the Wantage collection, which belonged to another relation by marriage (1905), his own Italian pictures (1914), a selection of the Holford manuscripts and pictures from Westonbirt (1924), and finally, in a magnificent two-volume publication, the pictures at Dorchester House (1927). In 1927 he sold his Italian pictures for £500,000 to Sir Joseph Duveen, who took them to America for dispersal. Some of his modern pictures were sold at Christie's on 21 June 1929, two months after his death on 7 April; this was the sale at which Croal Thomson bought Music. His enormous collections of Chinese porcelain, tapestries, carpets and other objets d'art were dispersed in a two-day sale at Christie's in July 1924 and a further three-day sale in June 1929. In the catalogue of his Italian paintings Benson acknowledged his debt to 'two great collectors of the past generation.' One was his father-in-law, Robert Holford, who had already combined an interest in the Old Masters with a keen appreciation of the work of living artists. When visiting Florence in 1847, Holford had met the young G. F. Watts, who put him on the track of a Giorgione. As a result, Watts was offered a studio in Dorchester House when he returned to London that year, retaining it until plans for the house's development forced him to leave in 1849. In 1855 Alfred Stevens was commissioned by Holford to decorate several rooms at Dorchester House, a scheme that dragged on until the artist's death twenty years later. In 1854 Holford had married Mary Anne Lindsay, the younger sister of Sir Coutts Lindsay, who was to found the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 as a liberal, avant-garde alternative to the Royal Academy. This was probably how Burne-Jones entered the circle, since he was to make his name at the Grosvenor and reign for a decade as its undisputed star. Details of Robert Benson's friendship with Burne-Jones are lacking in the form of letters or biographical references, but we know that he bought pictures from Charles Fairfax Murray, Burne-Jones's former assistant turned picture dealer. An example is Correggio's Christ taking Leave of His Mother, which Duveen gave to the National Gallery, London, in 1927. Benson's intimacy with the Burne-Jones circle is also suggested by a reference in J. W. Mackail's biography of the artist's lifelong friend William Morris. When Morris lay dying at Hammersmith in September 1896, it was Benson who took him manuscripts from Dorchester House to beguile his final days. Holford himself apparently never bought a Burne-Jones. True, there are three examples in Benson's catalogue of the Dorchester House pictures, but although Benson fails to make the point, they were actually bought after Holford's death by his son, George, when Burne-Jones's studio was sold up at Christie's in July 1898. The most important is the unfinished Sirens, now at Sarasota. They were almost certainly acquired at the suggestion of Benson himself, who is known to have advised his brother-in-law on his collection. In fact the man who inspired Benson to buy Burne-Jones as well as the Italians was the second of the 'two great collectors' whose influence he ackowledged, namely William Graham, the owner of the second version of Music. They knew each other well, Benson being a contemporary of Graham's son Rutherford at Balliol, and on 5 December 1884 we find Graham taking Benson to Christie's to show him how to bid for Burne-Jones's early watercolour The Forge of Cupid (see Wake, op. cit., p.177). In addition to being a devoted patron of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, Graham was an ardent devotee of the early Italian schools. It was in recognition of this that, shortly before Graham's death in 1885, Gladstone made him a Trustee of the National Gallery, a post that Benson in turn was to hold less than thirty years later. Benson was proud of the fact that no fewer than fifteen of the 114 pictures in his Italian catalogue had belonged to Graham. They included a Bellini altarpiece of The Madonna and Child with Saints, Ghirlandaio's Portrait of Francesco Sassetti and his Son, Cosimo Tura's Flight into Egypt (all Metropolitan Museum, New York), Piero di Cosimo's Hylas and the Nymphs (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticutt), and Dosso Dossi's Circe (National Gallery, Washington). These were some of the most desirable things in the collection. In 1927 Charles Ricketts, in his capacity as adviser to the National Gallery of Canada, wanted to secure the Piero di Cosimo or the Dosso Dossi, but he found they had already been sold. Benson owned examples of other English artists, including Gainsborough, Cotman, Watts and Sargent, who made charcoal portraits of all the Benson family. For nearly twenty years (1887-1906) he was the proud possessor of Millais' Sir Isumbras (Port Sunlight). But it was Burne-Jones to whom he was most attracted, clearly being drawn, like Graham before him, to the Italianate character of the artist's work. The sale at Christie's in June 1929 included three paintings by Burne-Jones and many watercolours and drawings, among them not only Music but versions of Cupid and Psyche (Yale University Art Gallery), Pan and Psyche (private collection), and Danaë and the Brazen Tower (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard). Nor was this the limit of Benson's Burne-Jones holdings. The sale did not, for instance, include the coloured cartoon for King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Birmingham) or The Depths of the Sea (private collection, Germany), both of which he owned. Again, he had examples that had formerly belonged to Graham, such as the Cophetua cartoon and the Danaë, and it would be interesting to know if he acquired Music in the knowledge that Graham had once owned the second version. How or when the picture entered his collection after it had left the hands of Mr Benjamin is unclear; the only certainty is that he and his wife had it by 1898. Music was painted during the period immediately preceding that watershed in Burne-Jones's life, the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Seven years earlier, at the age of thirty-six, he had resigned from the Old Water-Colour Society when objections were raised to the nude male figure in Phyllis and Demophoön (Birmingham). There followed a period of withdrawal and isolated development. He hardly exhibited, relying for income on such loyal patrons as Graham and the Liverpool shipownwer F. R. Leyland, but it was now that he perfected his mature style, painting a series of masterpieces - The Beguiling of Merlin (Port Sunlight), The Mirror of Venus (Gulbenkian Collection, Lisbon), The Angels of Creation (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard) and others - which were to burst upon an astonished world in 1877, bringing him fame overnight. In these and subsequent works which he showed at the Grosvenor until 1887 and thereafter at its successor, the New Gallery, he made his unique contribution to the Aesthetic Movement, emphasising formal values as forcefully as Whistler or Albert Moore, but also seeking to explore the spiritual and literary dimension in a way that would soon establish him as a central figure in European symbolism. Nothing did more to foster this aspect of his art than his love of Italian painting. His resignation from the OWCS in 1870 was only one of a series of professional and personal setbacks that shook his confidence and made him question the direction his art was taking. A weakening of old ties with Rossetti, Ruskin, and even Morris, not to mention the emotional turmoil of his affair with Mary Zambaco, must also be weighed in the balance. Seeking reassurance, he paid his last two visits to Italy in 1871 and 1873, and it was with a profound sense of rediscovering his spiritual roots that he diligently studied the masters of the quattrocentro and the early high Renaissance - Botticelli, Mantegna, Signorelli, Michelangelo and others. The results were immediately apparent in his work, which was never more Italianate than in the 1870s. Music encapsulates these developments. It is clearly an exercise in formal values, a decorative ensemble in the 'aesthetic' style. There is no real narrative content and the colour scheme is paramount, the red and green of the figures' dresses being echoed throughout the composition. As for the theme of music, it could hardly be more significant. Music, being the most abstract of the arts, was widely regarded as a test of 'aesthetic' probity. 'It is the art of music', Walter Pater wrote in his essay on 'The School of Giorgione' in The Renaissance (1873), 'which most completely realises this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter...therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire.' Artists varied in their attempt to put this theory into practice. Whistler took immense trouble over the colour harmonies of his pictures, then rammed the point home by giving them musical titles - 'harmonies', 'symphonies' or 'nocturnes'. Burne-Jones, who in fact knew much more about music than the American, was well aware of this approach. Of his picture The Hours (Fig.3), in which the principal colour of each figure's dress is taken up in the accessories of her neighbour, he observed tongue-in-cheek that 'Mr Whistler could, if he liked, call it a fugue.' For that matter, he might have said of Music that 'Mr Whistler could, if he liked, call it a harmony in pink and green.' But while his interest in colour harmony was, in its way, every bit as obsessive as Whistler's, Burne-Jones preferred to emphasise the musical analogy by making so many of his figures sing or play musical instruments. This dual interpretation of the Paterian ideal is epitomised by our picture. It would be interesting in this context to know more about the mysterious Mr Benjamin. Obviously Jewish and possibly a dealer, he reminds us of Murray Marks, the marchand amateur who did so much to determine the course of the Aesthetic Movement. It was Marks who helped Rossetti to form his collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain, the prototype of many others of the kind, and it was he who advised F.R. Leyland when this Maecenas was creating his great 'aesthetic' interior at 49 Prince's Gate, full of works by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler, Albert Moore and others. About 1870 Murray conceived the idea of an 'art firm', in which the artists he knew and admired would be partners. Possessing 'exclusive rights to sell the pictures executed by Watts, Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and the etchings produced by Whistler', it would 'make a point of recommending these pictures to the various art patrons of the day... [and] providing pictures which [were] really objects of beauty' (G.C. Williamson, Murray Marks and his Friends, 1919, pp. 98-9). Alexander Ionides, himself the creator of a great 'aesthetic' house in Holland Park, offered to put up capital, and although the project eventually fell through, etchings by Whistler were purchased and several paintings by Burne-Jones commissioned and painted. An example is a Sleeping Beauty of 1871 (Manchester), which has a flat linear quality and a subtle colour harmony which make it ideal as a piece of interior decoration. Such values are also found in paintings like The Wine of Circe and The Seasons (private collections), which were destined for Leyland's mansion and may well have had Marks's critical eye cast over them. It is tempting to wonder if Mr Benjamin was a business associate of Marks, or at least working along similar lines. If so, Music would have suited his purpose to perfection. The Italian influence which Burne-Jones felt so strongly at this period is also very evident. The picture's general conception suggests some Bellinesque design of the Virgin and Child in a landscape, while the girl reading a scroll faintly echoes certain figures on the Sistine ceiling, such as the Prophet Joel or the Delphic Sibyl. Certainly Burne-Jones had studied the ceiling closely in 1871, lying on the floor and looking up through opera glasses. There are further hints of Italy in the marble bench and its drapery, which in form appears to be inspired by curtains he had seen looped up over doorways in Genoa and made studies of in a sketchbook which he kept on the journey. But perhaps the most Italianate element in the picture is the landscape background, with two towns perched on hills. Again there are many sketches of these towns in the sketchbook, evidently made as he travelled from one centre to another by carriage or train, and Lady Burne-Jones emphasises his fondness for them in her account of the visit. 'The landscape of Italy was his lasting delight, especially in the volcanic regions where hills rose suddenly from the plain and cities grew out of the hills' (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 1904, II, p. 26). It was obviously these references to Italy and Italian art that recommended the picture to William Graham, who, as R. H. Benson wrote, 'could hardly resist any Early Italian picture, sacred or profane, provided it was reverent or true in feeling'; and no doubt it appealed to Benson himself a generation later, whether or not he knew that Graham, his mentor, had owned the second version. Burne-Jones also treated the theme of music in two designs for needlework, but one, much earlier, is lost, and the other, slightly later, bears no relation to the present picture. We are grateful to Charles Sebag-Montefiore and Stephen Wildman for help in preparing this entry.