The hands are for the figures of, from left to right, Sibylla Persica, St. Matthew and Sibylla Cumana. The two studies to the left of the page are for Sibylla Persica and the two on the right are for Sibylla Cumana. At this date the artist was preparing paintings from cartoons. It was his practice to make detailed studies of all the elements in a painting. These four were most likely made after the cartoons had been prepared and were to be passed to an assistant for laying in the design onto canvas. However, as was characteristic of the artist who prepared more works than could possibly be achieved, neither of the two side figures became paintings unlike the central figure of St. Matthew (now in the Ponce Museum of Art, Puerto Rico).
These pencil studies of a model’s hands were made in preparation for a stained-glass window in three lights in the church of St Edward the Confessor, Cheddleton, Staffordshire. (See A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle – A Catalogue, two volumes, New Haven, 1974, I, plate X.) The two studies on the left side of the sheet are related to the left hand of the angel in the central compartment and with which he grasps the trumpet close to its mouthpiece, while the two studies on the right are related to the right hand of the angel in the right-hand compartment and where again the angel’s hand is seen gripping the trumpet close to his chin. The medieval church of St Edward was restored by George Gilbert Scott in 1863-4. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co were commissioned to make decorations, brought in presumably because of the friendship of William Morris and the churchwarden Thomas Wardle, who was a cloth manufacturer in nearby Leek. (See Nikolaus Pevsner, Staffordshire, London, 1974, pp. 100-101.) Ford Madox Brown was the first member of the Morris firm to work there, making a design for a stained glass for the chancel in 1864. Burne-Jones designed the Three Angels blowing Long Trumpets window in 1869 as a memorial to Anne Boucher, the wife of the incumbent, the Revd A.F. Boucher. The window is in the church’s south aisle. On this occasion, Burne-Jones made the figures quite large within the overall composition. A. Charles Sewter described the finished window as representing ‘an important point of transition in [Burne-Jones]’s development, [and] is one of the most splendid and individual which he ever designed. The figures were often repeated elsewhere, but never with an effect equal to this first example.’ (A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle – A Catalogue, two volumes, New Haven, 1974, II, pp. 50-51). Bill Waters has identified the sculptress Maria Zambaco, with whom Burne-Jones was engaged in a love affair at the time of the Cheddleton commission, as the model for each of the three angels, describing it as a ‘significantly personal window’. (William Waters and Alastair Carew-Cox, Angels & Icons – Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass 1850-1870, Worcester, 2012, p. 297.) The careful attention to the anatomy of the hands in the drawing, their forms shown in radiating light so as to show the bone structure, veins and musculature, is remarkable – and this despite the fact that such detailed observation would not lend itself to transfer into the medium of stained glass. It may be assumed that the hands represented were those of Maria Zambaco. It is likely that Burne-Jones reused the studies in 1873-74 when designing the figures of sibyls for the St Matthew window at Jesus College, Cambridge, where the two studies on the left side of the sheet correspond to the raised right hand of the Cumaean Sibyl (but reversed in the glass), and the two on the right correspond to the right hand of the Persian Sibyl. (See Sewter, I, plate 432.)