An undated letter (around 1891) written by Burne-Jones to Horner enclosed a drawing (private collection), which may be the drawing referred to below. 'Dearest Frances Rooke tells me you want little figures in the spaces left in his bed quilt thing he has copied for you – so I have done a sort of Flora, amended from the original which may perhaps do – but it is only a guide for the outline & I dont know what colour the rest is – so dont bother about the colour, make it what you like that will go with the rest – its the first work I have done & I am still as weak as con be, but perhaps it is good enough for the purpose … I wonder if the figure will do – Rooke drew the space out but on such nasty coloured paper that it was discouraging to work but I dare say it will do my dear…’ A design survives at Mells. Our needlework presumably post-dates a fragment of needlework, now part of a bedhead, that also remains at Mells, as well as a framed panel with the same design surrounded by an elaborate design of embroidered flowers. We are grateful to Lord Oxford and Caroline Dakers for their help in identifying our needlework.
Edward Burne-Jones and Lady Frances Horner maintained a close relationship until the artist’s death in 1898. In 1883, writing to John Ruskin, Burne-Jones joked about her marriage to Sir John Horner, after all he had done for her: But to name every one how could I remember? for instance, many a patient design went to adorning Frances’ ways . . . Sirens for her girdle, Heavens and Paradises for her prayer-books, Virtues and Vices for her necklace-boxes – ah! the folly of me from the beginning – and now in the classic words of Mr. Swiveller ‘she has gone and married a market gardener’.1 Among these ‘patient design[s]’ Burne-Jones created a series of small watercolours intended for insets in tapestries and bed boards (see MM74). Each one features an identical image of a young woman in a red robe with her right arm resting on a Grecian urn and her left reaching out to a flower. One of the small watercolours was inset into a larger tapestry which hangs above the fireplace in the Drawing Room at Mells. 1. Edward Burne-Jones to John Ruskin, 1883, quoted in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1904, vol. 2, pp. 130–1; see also Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998, p. 243.