Edward Burne-Jones revered old master drawings and collected photographic reproductions of them. In the early 1870s he made two trips to Italy where he saw examples at first hand. At that time he started to draw with the point of a hard pencil, emulating the precise, needle-sharp line which he associated with Florentine drawings of the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
One of a number of studies of elaborately plaited hair which were made in association with the head of Fortune in The Wheel of Fortune. Burne-Jones abandoned the complex coiffure in favour of a simple bonnet, under which the hairstyle is hidden.