A number of designs for this subject exist, taken from Edmund Spenser's 'Faerie Queen' (1590), Book III, Canto XII. Shortly after creating a number of designs in the early 1870s, Burne-Jones abandoned the project, only to take it up once again shortly before his death in 1898. This drawing is taken from the lines: '[s]terne Strife and Anger stout,/ Unjust Care and foul Unthriftyhead,/ Lewd Losse of time, and Sorrow seeming dead.Two pencil studies dating from 1872, are in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. Also extant is the entire scheme in watercolour, composed over a doorway, dating from 1898 and now in a private collection.