Dated at the base of the tree: 1856; inscribed:

THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS
PREPARE YE THE WAY OF THE LORD MAKE HIS PATHS STRAIGHT

EVERY VALLEY SHALL BE FILLED, AND EVERY MOUNTAIN AND HILL SHALL BE BROUGHT LOW
AND THE CROOKED SHALL BE MADE STRAIGHT AND THE ROUGH WAYS SHALL BE MADE SMOOTH.

Burne-Jones's early pen-and-ink drawings are among his rarest and most fascinating productions. Only some ten finished examples were executed. The first, now lost, was The Waxen Image, a scene of witchcraft in two compartments dating from 1856, the year he met Dante Gabriel Rossetti and began to work under his supervision. This drawing, John the Baptist, dates from this first year. The last drawing in the sequence is an illustration to Browning's poem Childe Roland (Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford). This dates from 1861, by which time Burne-Jones was exchanging pen-and-ink for watercolour as his primary medium of expression.

Burne-Jones had several reasons for adopting the pen-and-ink technique. First, he was already familiar with it, having used it for the illustrations to The Fairy Family that he had begun as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1854. Intended for engraving, the drawings were commissioned by the author of the book, Archibald Maclaren, a fencing master whose gymnasium in Oxford was frequented by Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris. Burne-Jones continued to work on the drawings until 1856, but his meeting with Rossetti in January that year so opened his eyes to new stylistic horizons that he became dissatisfied with them and never completed the work. Only three drawings appeared in the book when it was published in 1857. Their authorship was not revealed, and he refused to recognise any of the drawings as part of the Burne-Jones canon.

A second reason for favouring pen-and-ink was that Rossetti himself was a devotee of the medium. It was obviously natural to continue using it now that he was Rossetti's most ardent follower. However, Burne-Jones's handling of pen-and-ink was always drier and more finicky than Rossetti's, and this suggests another influence. John Ruskin was almost as much admired by Burne-Jones and Morris as Rossetti himself. Having read him avidly at Oxford, they met him for the first time in November 1856, and Ruskin may well have encouraged the young artist to persevere with pen-an-ink. In The Elements of Drawing, published the following year but based on long experience of teaching at the Working Men's College, Ruskin urges his readers to begin with this medium and advocates a method very similar to that adopted by Burne-Jones, in which tones are built up with minute touches and dots and the pen-knife used to soften forms and erase unwanted lines.

Equally significant was the use Ruskin made of Dürer's prints as teaching instruments. He was collecting them eagerly from the early 1850s and constantly lending them to those he was trying to guide and influence: his pupils at the Working Men's College, the girls of Winnington School, or artists such as Lady Waterford and Rossetti's fiancée Elizabeth Siddal. The Elements of Drawing abounds in references to Dürer's engravings, which the reader is told to acquire and copy as aids to painstaking, accurate draughtmanship.

Although Burne-Jones was undoubtedly familiar with Dürer's work before he left Oxford in 1856, there can be little doubt that Ruskin lent him examples and encouraged him to study them. He may well have been the source of the drawings [sic] of Albert Dürer that were hanging in the studio that Burne-Jones and Morris shared that year in Upper Gordon Street, Bloomsbury; and he was certainly to give Burne-Jones a group of Dürer's most important engravings and woodcuts - all perfect impressions, according to the lucky recipient - in 1865.

Whatever Ruskin's precise role, there is no doubt that Dürer's engravings were a major influence on Burne-Jones's pen-and-ink drawings. Rossetti virtually acknowledged as much when he described them to William Bell Scott (another Dürer enthusiast) as marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequalled by anything unless perhaps Albert Dürer's finest works. As this implies, Dürer not only shaped Burne-Jones's approach to the medium but supplied many of the quaint and picturesque details in which the ardent yet tongue-in-cheek medievalism of Rossetti's circle in the late 1850s found much of its expression. One drawing, the Sir Galahad of 1858 (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard), derives its whole concept and design from the artist's famous engraving The Knight, Death and the Devil. This was one of the first Düreresque images to impinge on Burne-Jones and Morris since a reproduction had served as the frontispiece to Fouqué's Sintram and his Companions, a book to which they had been devoted at Oxford.

Most of the drawings are in public collections. The Wise and Foolish Virgins and Alice La Belle Pélerine are two that have appeared on the market since the year 2000.

Rossetti's influence, so obvious in the choice of subject for The Waxen Image, continued to pervade the medieval themes of 1858. Or rather it contributed an essential element to a consensus of ideas of which they were an outstanding product. Although Burne-Jones and Morris were adoring acolytes of their charismatic leader, Rossetti gained much from his followers too, and it was only after meeting them in 1856 and coming into contact with their already committed and highly developed medievalism, that his own work took on the 'chivalric' or 'Froissartian' tone that characterised it for the next few years. Thus Burne-Jones's pen drawings of 1858, Rossetti's watercolours of the same period, and Morris's first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, also published this year, may be seen as three sides of a triangle, expressing a medievalist vision with a unity of purpose and a common imagery that reflect the intimacy of the three men's social relations.

Inscribed with a quotation from St John Chapter 1 verse 23 and St Luke Chapter 3 verse 5 referring to the ministry of St John the Baptist.

At the time the drawing was made c. 1856-7, Burne Jones was innocent of traditional iconography and encouraged by Rossetti, he allowed his own imagination to interpret his subject matter. In his Annunciation (1927P441) in Birmingham Art Gallery, begun 1857, the Virgin holds the Dove and in this drawing, John the Baptist also is without iconographic precedent. The taste for Integrating words and image is an early indication of a life long practice.