Burne-Jones may possibly have been inspired by the allegories of his friend G. F. Watts whom he had known from the late 1850s and whose work he continued to admire. It was Watts who encouraged him to visit Italy in 1859 where he studied, among other Renaissance paintings, the works of Botticelli, a major if distant influence on the figure in this painting. However, despite obvious Italianate elements, the prototype for the single hovering figure above a city may well be Dürer's engraving, the 'Large Nemesis', c.1500. Morris and Burne-Jones had discovered the work of Dürer when undergraduates at Oxford and, to his great delight, John Ruskin gave him a number of Dürer engravings and woodcuts in 1865.
The blue monochrome and spontaneous treatment link it with a number of subjects at this period: Night (water xolour, 1870); Evening (two water colour versions, 1870-1, 1872-3) and Luns (oil, 1872-5).