Previously misidentified as being Augusta Jones
Rossetti letter to Madox Brown 23 January 1869: Poor Ned's affairs have come to a smash altogether, and he and Topsy, after the most dreadful to-do, started for Rome suddenly, leaving the Greek damsel beating up the quarters of all his friends for him and howling like Cassandra. Georgie stayed behind. I hear to-day however that Top and Ned got no further than Dover, Ned being so dreadfully ill that they will probably have to return to London.
The sitter has been identified by Betty Elzea as Anne-Marie or Augusta Jones (b.1843), the sister of Mary Emma Jones, who lived with the artist Frederick Sandys as his common-law wife. An actress and favourite model of Burne-Jones in the mid-186os, she was the sitter for Princess Sabra in The Princess in the Garden (1866; Musee d'Orsay, Paris), the first oil painting of his St George series, and also posed for several other leading artists, including Rossetti, Simeon Solomon and Whistler. She married Frederick Vincent Hart, a designer and architect. Burne-Jones frequently used the technique of soft chalk on fairly heavy paper, which gives a rich, grainy texture to shadows and background in his work of the 186os - both for figure studies for paintings, such as Green Summer (c.1864; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), and in highly finished signed drawings such as this.
In January 1869 his wife Georgina found a letter from Maria in his clothing and Burne-Jones reluctantly ended the affair.