The inscription on the back of this little painting suggests that the scene is from the story of the French King Francis I, who was imprisoned by the Spanish King Charles V after the Battle of Pavia in 1525; the view from his prison window, with a procession of knights with horns proceeding to a castle gate. Small, rectangular and done in dry bodycolour with the brush dragged across a rough surface, the picture fits into a group of works that Burne-Jones and Fairfax Murray were painting in collaboration with William Morris in 1869-70. A poem by Morris (MS in the Fitzwilliam Museum) that begins ‘Once my fell foe...’ about a Knight imprisoned after a battle seems to describe the scene exactly: ‘There I lay in prison strong... / There was a window small to see... / with two bars was it made full fast.’
A study for the knights seen through the window in the watercolour version of Laus Veneris, (Maas Gallery 2016). It takes further the sketch which implies the landscape and the knights riding by into a more solid composition.