In addition to the six-fold panel illustrating the story of Cinderella (cat. no. 23), Burne-Jones provided Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. with two further designs for tiles in late 1862 that depict the single figure of Cinderella in her rags, sweeping with a broom, and then in the semblance of a queen, with flowing hair and draped gown. 1 This watercolour of 1863 continues the narrative sequence by showing Cinderella once more in the kitchen: "It is the day after the ball, and in her worn and patched green gown, the lit- tle glass slipper on her foot, she leans there dreamily playing with the corner of her apron; a pink rose is in a glass on the shelf, and, on the ground beside her, half lost in the shadow, are the pumpkin and the rat which have known such strange transformations [into coach and coachman]." 2 Burne-Jones here adds solidity, as well as an increased depth of colour, to the type of female figure subject he had been developing since 1860. He once remarked that "you get the beauty of the colour only in the lights," and this is evident here in the scraped and glazed highlights of Cinderella's mottled dress, set off by the bright blue of the plates behind her. These are a reminder of the then- current craze for Oriental blue-and-white porcelain, indulged in particularly by Rossetti and Whistler. Cinderella was one of the first group of four works submitted by Burne- Jones to the Old Water-Colour Society on his election as an Associate in 1864, where it served as a complement to the slightly larger watercolor Fair Rosamund (private collec- tion), also of 1863. 3 1. See Myers and Myers 1996, p. 31, pis. i4a,b. 2. De Lisle 1904, p. 68. 3. Arts Council 1975-76, no. 39.
Signed and dated within a frame EBJ 1863. The model resembles Georgiana Burne-Jones