Frances Horner, née Graham (1858-1940), was the daughter of a Scottish MP and collector who married the barrister John Francis Fortescue Horner in 1883. She met Burne-Jones when she was about eighteen and she became a life long friend, muse and patron of the artist. They exchanged letters almost daily and she posed for several of his paintings including as the bride in The King's Wedding and as a nymph for Perseus and the Sea Nymphs. Burne-Jones also gave her many gifts of friendship of his works of which the present work is a small but intimate example. It is one of only two ex-libris that Burne-Jones ever created.
Frances Graham married John Horner in 1883; Brian North Lee dates this bookplate to a probable 1892 ('British Bookplates: a pictorial history' (1979), cat. no. 130). The design seems also to have been used for a bookplate by C W Sherborn reproduced by process by Messrs Walker and Boutelll, see C.D. Sherborn, p.64 - unless this is not a woodcut, but the process engraving. C W Sherborn executed a second bookplate for Frances Horner incorporating a ship in full sail. Anthony Pincott (email May 2021) notes that the other bookplates designed by Burne Jones were for Cicely Horner (daughter of Frances) and Pamela Margaret Jekyll (garden designer Gertrude was her aunt). Lit.: Remo Palmirani, Ex libris. Art Nouveau, Florence, 1991, pp.28-29, pl.4, as a 'fototipografia' c. 1892; Martin Hopkinson, 'Ex libris, the art of bookplates', BM 2011, p.20.