In the early 1860s, the engravers George and Edward Dalziel planned to publish an Illustrated Bible; many artists contributed to it, including Burne-Jones, but the project came to nothing at this time. Probably in 1863, Burne-Jones prepared seven vignettes of the Creation together with designs for Ezekiel and the Boiling Pot, Christ in the Garden, The Eve of the Deluge and The Return of the Dove to the Ark. When the project eventually reached publication in Dalziel's Bible Gallery in 1880, only the Ezekiel design was used and the rest were never published.In common with many of the drawings in the J.R. Holliday bequest, this design has been inscribed with Burne-Jones's initials and given a title by his former studio assistant Charles Fairfax Murray, who in his later years (he died in 1919) became well-known as a collector, connoisseur and dealer. As with many of Burne-Jones's designs, this composition has many studies and exists in several differing versions but this drawing is closest to the uncut drawing on woodblock in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which is presumably as Burne-Jones intended it to be published. One side of this sheet shows the complete composition ofThe Eve of the Deluge and includes an additional full-length female figure walking through the opening on the extreme left, who was eventually omitted in the final composition.On the reverse are pencil sketches of two rows of six figures inscribed 'Nimue, Merlin, Morgan la Fay, Arthur, Guenevere, Launcelot / Tristram, Iseult, Palomides, Bors, Percival, Galahad'. These have nothing to do with the famous series of tapestries of subjects from the Legend of the Holy Grail, which date from the early 1890s, but instead relate to a project of 1863, in which Burne-Jones proposed to design a set of hangings covered with figures from Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Whilst the artist's wife Georgiana states in her biography of her husband that she embroidered Merlin and Morgan la Fay and started Arthur and Launcelot, as with many of Burne-Jones's schemes, the whole project was never realised, although some parts of it were developed as independent compositions.