Maria Zambaco was the model
This painting depicts a stately woman pouring water on the flames of excess. It is one of Burne-Jones' last paintings of his model and mistress, Maria Zambaco, and can be read as an image of Maria finally extinguishing the flames of their passion. It was commissioned by Frederick Startridge Ellis and shown at the 1872 inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in London.
Foord and Dickinson, 129 Wardour Street, London were framers
Elizabeth Mary Foord’s husband, George, died in 1842, leaving her to manage Foord’s, the well-known picture framemakers in Wardour Street, Soho, until her death in 1856. Most unusually, she left her daughters the business, which then traded as Eliza & C. Foord, but evidently she had reservations since she stipulated that the business was ‘to be carried on under the entire and sole management of William Dickinson’, her foreman. If her daughters were to marry, the business and stock would pass to their brother Charles Foord and to Dickinson, as apparently happened in 1859 when the firm became Foord & Dickinson. Eliza & C. Foord supplied several frames to the newly founded National Portrait Gallery in 1857 (fig. 3), and the firm did much work for the Pre-Raphaelites and other leading artists.