The Piano was commissioned by William Graham for his daughter Frances in 1879. Music-making frequently figures in the art of Burne-Jones. He himself was passionately fond of music and encouraged Georgie to exercise her ability in singing. Just before his marriage in 1862, he undertook to decorate two upright pianos. The decoration consisted of easel paintings, which occupied the front panels. As decoration they were unsophisticated and could be easily hung separately as pictures. The later piano designs of the 1870’s were far more complex. The Poet Muse was a design for the lid of a grand piano commissioned by William Graham, 1879. Known as the Orpheus Piano the inner lid bears the design of a naked figure of Mother Earth surrounded by babies playing amongst the tendrils of the vine. The sides bear medallions illustrating the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, whilst this drawing is for the outer lid depicting the Inspiration of the Poet. The designs are a base of green stained wood. The piano, completed in 1880, was the first of several major commissions for pianos in which he later collaborated with Kate Faulkner. In a letter to her he wrote, 'I can’t say how much the Graham piano would cost to reproduce - a horrible big sum - but I should like Broadwood to be venturesome and have a few made on speculation - some only stained - not always green - sometimes other colours - and then a few here and there with an ornament well designed and painted - and at least one covered with ornament and presently we should see if people would have them or not.' A design for the top of the lid for the Graham Piano with sketches of Guido Cavalcanti and his muse.
The drawing is for the design on the outside of the lid of the well-known "Graham" or "Orpheus" piano (private collection: fig 1). The instrument was commissioned in 1879 by Burne-Jones's great patron William Graham, a wealthy India merchant and member of parliament for Glasgow. It was a twenty-first birthday present for his daughter Frances, later Lady Horner, who was herself a close friend of Burne-Jones. indeed she was the most important of the many young women with whom he enjoyed sentimental but platonic relationships in later life, a position which did much to ensure her ascendancy in the coterie known as the "Souls" which came to prominence in the 1880s. His portrait of her, painted in 1879, was sold at Christie's London on 10 march 1995, lot 156. Burne-Jones was responsible for both the design for both the design and decoration of the piano, which was made by John Broadwood and Sons. the overall design, in which he sought to replace the bulges and curves of the conventional Victorian grand with the more chaste lines of the harpsichord, was reproduced commercially, but the "Graham" piano was unique in its lavish decoration. The sides are painted with grisaille illustrations to the story of Orpheus, while the lid has a design representing "Terra Omnipaneus" the earth mother with her numerous offspring, on the inside, and "The Inspiration of a Poet" on the outside . In the finished work the inspiring muse is a likeness of Frances Graham, an obvious allusion to her role in the artist's life, while the scroll to the right bears a text from Dante's Vita Nuova. Christie's 1998