One of a small group of landscapes made by Burne-Jones in 1863, three of which are in the Birmingham Collection. Burne-Jones very rarely painted and drew pure landscape subjects, and then essentially as sketches for backgrounds of figure paintings in open-air settings. Nonetheless, it is interesting that despite this professed dissatisfaction with 'woodland scenes', almost all of Burne-Jones's surviving landcape sketches are of woods, forest glades and trees. It has been suggested by some scholars that these landscapes served as background studies for Burne-Jones's 1863 work, The Merciful Knight, also in Birmingham's Collection. His granddaughter, Angela Thirkell, who presented these landscapes to Birmingham stated that these were in fact used for the 1864 watercolour Green Summer (Private Collection). Presented by Mrs G L Thirkell, 1954.
This and no. 247 [Burne-Jones 1975] were almost certainly made at the same time as the study background for The Merciful Knight (no. 84 [Burne-Jones 1975]), during Burne-Jones's visit to Spencer Stanhope at Cobham in June 1863.