Stylistically the present work closely relates to studies for The Court of Venus, a work of 1865 (Private Collection, UK) and to the Pygmalion series dating 1868-70.
This drawing is very similar in scale and technique to one that Julian Hartnoll had for sale in 1972 (illustrated in his Catalogue Twenty-five, no 2 and C. Wood, Burne-Jones, London 1998, p. 85). The Hartnoll drawing was a study for the sculptural group in the background of The Heart Desires, the first of the Pygmalion Series, in its small early version now in the Lloyd Webber Collection (see the catalogue of the Collection when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy last year, p.84). The early version of the series was commissioned in 1868 by Eurhrosyne Cassavetti, the mother of maria Zambaco with whom Burne-Jones was currently conducting a tempestuous affair, and completed two years later. The Hartnoll drawing, therefore, almost certainly dates from 1868. It certainly cannot be earlier than 1867 since the Pygmalion designs were only conceived that year as part of a never-completed scheme to illustrate William Morris's Earthly Paradise. Our drawing must also date from about 1868, and may indeed represent another idea for the sculpture in The Heart Desires. We know that Burne-Jones considered more than one solution for this detail since it is different in the large and definitive Pygmalion Series (Birmingham Art Gallery), begun in 1875 and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1879. In the small version the sculpture represents four naked girls with their arms entwined, while in the larger version a group of three girls, presumably the three Graces, has been suggested. Although in conception the drawing reflects the prevailing classicism of the late 1860s, the soft chalk technique looks back to the "Venetian" mode that Burne-Jones and many of his peers had adopted earlier in the decade. Following his last two visits to Italy in 1871 and 1873 he would more or less abandon the use of chalk, preferring a more 2Florentiine" manner of drawing in hard pencil or even,occasionally, silverpoint on a prepared ground. Christie's 3 June 2004