This wistful and very private portrait of the artist's daughter Margaret is typical of the private images that Burne-Jones made. He had decided not to accept any portrait commissions during the 1880's and so these very personal images were never created to be seen publicly. Thus they break all the rules that were understood by the Victorian art establishment. As a painting the present portrait is strikingly modern, akin to work done in the first decade of the Twentieth Century rather than the end of the Nineteenth. The reduced range of melancholy colours, the wistful, distant expression of the girl’s face, and the broad, confident brush-strokes of her hands suggest the paintings of Picasso during the Blue Period. This is not such an impossible connection, as it might at first seem. Burne-Jones was greatly admired in Europe in the last years of his life. In Barcelona, where Picasso lived as a young man, a circle of painters and journalists made a cult of English painting and illustration from the Pre-Raphaelites onwards. Beardsley was regarded as a hero of modernism and was imitated by Spanish artists. The periodical Joventut reproduced drawings by Rossetti, Arthur Boyd Houghton and Burne-Jones. In 1898 the Society of San Luc in Barcelona held a session in honour of Burne-Jones. It may well be that the youthful Picasso, who certainly knew and admired Burne-Jones’s drawings and paintings, subconsciously incorporated something of the spirit of the English painter into his own work.
When the painting was sold at the Remaining works Studio sale in June 1919, the painting was catalogued as "Lot 170 Portrait of a Lady in green dress". As the painting was being sold by the family, it is unlikely that a portrait of the artist's daughter would have been so titled, also as there is no resemblance to the known portraits of Margaret it puts the subsequent identification into question.
The young Picasso’s attraction to Burne-Jones is occasionally mentioned in passing but rarely discussed in depth; as Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone rightly point out, echoes of this fascination, possibly spurred by seeing Burne-Jones’s work in the flesh at the Exposition, can be traced in the pale profiles and all-pervading blue atmosphere of some of his Blue Period portraits.8 8 Wilton and Upstone (1997), pp. 32-33, 272