Included in Henry 6th Marquess of Lansdowne, Catalogue of Water Colours, pastels & Drawings at 20 Mansfield Street & at Bowood, n.d., p. 15 This is one of a small group of immaculately crated drawings each depending on a dense and highly elaborate pen and ink technique, which are of crucial importance in the emergence of Burne-Jones's most distinctive artistic personality in the late 1850s. It takes its place with two other drawings of 1858. The first of these is the somewhat smaller subject the Knight's Farewell (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), made in about February of the year and soon after Burne-Jones's return to London from oxford where he had been collaborating with Rossetti and others on the mural decoration on the theme off the Morte D' Arthur or the debating chamber of the newly built Oxford University Union. The second is the somewhat taller drawing entitled Going to the Battle (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), probably made in response to Rossetti's oil Before the Battle, which Burne-Jones first saw in London in may 1858. The present drawing, King's Daughters,was made in the Summer of 1856. In 1875 john Christian described the present drawing as "a study in the formal value of line and pattern rather than a treatment of any specific subject" (Bune-Jones exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, 1975, p. 21). It is possible however, that although the figures represented in the drawing are not intended to be individually identified, nor is there any overt indication of the event - historical or literary - that they are participating in, Burne-Jones was prompted to draw this subject of a gathering of twenty-one or twenty-two women and girls in a garden, with a view beyond of white sea cliffs, by his reading of Shakespeare's King Lear. If that were the case, the three principal figures - the women at the centre who carries the portable organ, the one on the right who wears a flowing robe decorated with a pattern of hearts, and the one on the let who is attended by two other girls who seem to comfort her and hold her hands - would correspond to Lear's daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia (and hence the drawing's title), surrounded by maid servants and companions at the court of their father. The distant cliffs would allude to events in the play when the mad Lear is conveyed to Dover, there to be met by the faithful Cordelia. Burne-Jones was an avid reader, and would surely have known Shakespeare's King Lear well. he may also have also been directed to this theme by seeing Ford Madox Brown's painting King Lear (Tate Gallery), which dates from 1848-9 and which gives a narrative rendition of a scene from the play. This particular painting was visible in London at about the time that Burne-Jones drew his King's Daughters , as it was then returned from thee traveling exhibition of English paintings in America in 1858, and was shortly afterwards sold to Thomas Plint, the Leeds stockbroker who was also a patron of Burne-Jones in the late 1850s. It is tempting to think that Burne-Jones may have seen Brown's King Lear, which as an example of Pre-Raphaelitism in its primary phase would have been of intense interest to him, not lest because, 1858 was the year in which the longstanding friendship between Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown began. The drawing is of quality that places it on a par with Burne-Jones's most famous pen and ink work of the late 1850s. The Wise and Foolish Virgins (private collection), which is a rather larger drawing done a year later. Although on that occasion a specific Biblical narrative the present drawing it is richly animated with a myriad of incidental detail. In both drawings, as in the stained glass window telling the story of the life of St Frideswide that he was also working on in the period (for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford), almost the entire pictorial surface is densely crowded with the patterns made by the figures and their dresses. here we find just a narrow margin in the foreground in which appears a pool, and an upper register which is itself highly worked with the branches of fruit trees which mask the landscape beyond, but otherwise the surface is laden with the pattern of closely conjoined figures. Burne-Jones's pen and ink drawings of the late 1850s were much admired in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, as is witnessed by a comment made by Rossetti in a letter to William Bell Scott, of 7 February 1857. After explaining that he had encountered Burne-Jones and William Morris while they were still at Oxford and engaged on the Oxford & Cambridge Magazine, he described how "they (had) turned artists instead of taking up any career to which the university usually leads, and are both men of real genius. Ruskin has the most unbounded hopes of them both." He then identified Burne-Jones's "designs (as0 anything except perhaps Albert Durer" (Quoted The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Formative Years, edited by William E. Fredeman, Cambridge, 2002, II p. 171). it seems likely that it was George Frederick Watts who suggested to the Marquess of Lansdowne that he should buy the present drawing. Burne-Jones was at this stage by no means professionally established and was furthermore suffering from poor health and nervous exhaustion, and was therefore in need of emotional and physical support. In 1858 Watts was engaged on a cycle of frescoes for Bowood, Lord Lansdowne's seat in Wiltshire. Watts and Burne-Jones were in close touch at the time, both staying for extended periods at Little Holland House in London as guests of the Prinsep family. The drawing the King's Daughters was probably made at Little Holland House where Burne-Jones was "forbidden ... to touch or smell paint" (G. B-J., Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, I, p.178) because it was believed to be the cause of his poor health. The drawing has remained in the possession of descendants of Lord Lansdowne, never previously coming on the market. With the exception of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, it is the only Burne-Jones drawing of this type to remain in private hands. Sotheby's 2002