This watercolour sketch was made as a preparatory study fr the planned gesso panel showing the subject The Court of Phineas for the cycle of paintings and decorations known as the Perseus Series , which Burne-Jones devised for the music room of Arthur James Balfour's house in Carlton Gardens in 1875. According to the initial scheme this subject was to be placed above the doorway as the penultimate subject in the series. Three designs in watercolour of c.1875-6 show how Burne-Jones first intended to distribute the subjects (see the Age of Rosetti, Burne-Jones & Watts - Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910, Tate Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 1997, nos 93-5). The story of Perseus, familiar from the version given by Ovid in Metamorphoses (Book V), had been treated by William Morris in his poem The Doom of King Acrisius which formed a part of the cycle of poems The Earthly Paradise, and which Burne-Jones had undertaken to illustrate in the late 1860s. Burne-Jones made a list of episodes in Morris's poems that he felt would be particularly appropriate as illustrations. Number 22 on this list he described as 'Phineas bursting in the hall. Perseus showing head' Perseus having accomplished the mission of gaining the Medusa's head as he had been commanded to do by Polydectes King of Seriphos, had rescued Andromeda from a sea-monster to which she had been sacrificed to propitiate the gods whom Andromeda's mother Cassiepeia had offended. Perseus and Andromeda fell in love and were to be married, but Phineus defended his bride and himself by producing the Medusa's head, the magical power of which was to turn all who saw it to stone. The passage of Morris's poem that Burne-Jones had intended to represent in the gesso panel is as follows: "then all set on him with a mighty cry; But, with a shout that thrilled high ver theirs, He drew the head out by the snaky hairs And turned on them the baleful glassy eyes; Then sank to silence all that storm of cries And clashing arms, the tossing points that shone In the last sunbeams, went out one by one As the sun left them, or each man there died. E'en as the shepherd on the bare hill-side Smitten amid the grinding of the storm, When, while the hare lies flat in her wet form E/en strong men quake for fear in houses strong And nigh the ground the lightning runs along. But upright on their feet the dead men stood; In brow and cheek still flushed the angry blood: This smiled, the mouth of that was open wide, This other drew the great sword from his side, All were at point to do this thing or that.' The composition of The Court of Phineus is one of the most dramatic and disturbing of all the ten panels originally envisaged for the scheme, showing as it does the moment when an entire crowd of men are transfixed in death. The present sketch shows Phineus' companions recoiling as a single mass as if electrocuted. The Court of Phineus was one of the first subjects that Burne-Jones worked on after receiving the commission of the Perseus Series, and in 1875-6 he made powerful pencil drawings of the individual figures and for the overall compositioon. (See Kurt Locher. Der Perseus-Zyklus von Edward Burne-Jones, Stuttgart, 1973 plates 119-25)