The Macdonald sisters, Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa, were 4 Scottish sisters, notable for their marriages to well-known people of the Victorian era. Alice (1837–1910), born 4 April in Sheffield, married John Lockwood Kipling, and became the mother of Rudyard Kipling on 31 December 1865. Lord Dufferin once said, "Dullness and Mrs Kipling cannot exist in the same room." Georgiana (1840–1920) married the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones in 1859. Agnes married the future president of the Royal Academy Edward Poynter. Her husband later painted two of her sisters. She, Jane Morris and her sisters Louisa and Georgiana are thought to be the inspiration for figures in Burne-Jones 1864 painting Green Summer. Louisa (1845–1925) married the industrialist Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Louisa wrote novels, short stories, and poetry, sometimes credited as "Mrs Alfred Baldwin."
This sensitive portrait is by the sitter's brother-in-law. Poynter married her sister Agnes in 1866. For Burne-Jones's portrait of her, painted thirteen years later, see no. 236 [Hayward Burne-Jones catalogue 1975] . It is interesting that the first Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1877 not only included eight works by Burne-Jones but a portrait of the artist by Watts (no. 30 in this exhibition) and this drawing of his wife.