Following academic practice stretching back to the Renaissance, 19th-century artists such as Burne Jones would make numerous studies of heads and figures in preparation for a picture. Many were highly finished and the more exquisite examples, such as this one, were sought after by collectors as independent works of art. This study may relate to a figure in Burne-Jones's painting The Golden Stairs of 1876-80.
A favourite model of the mid-1870s who appears as Venus in The Godhead Fires and The Mirror of Venus