In his last years Burne-Jones painted a series of exquisite pictures of female figures and head studies on blue paper heightened with gold paint. These pictures were highly experimental and demonstrate Burne-Jones' enduring need to explore different techniques, even in his maturity. He told Thomas Matthew Rooke on 22 April 1897 "This gold work must be done very directly - it's an art of itself. I forget how I do it between one time and another, and it's always an experiment.'" (Mary Lago, Burne-Jones Talking: His Conversations, 1895-1898, Preserved by his Studio Assistant Thomas Rooke, 1982, p.143) Burne-Jones wrote in a letter to his friend Frances Horner about a Byzantine book of Gospels that he had seen in Quaritch's bookshop; 'every sheet dipped in a vat of Tyrian purple dye. There are five-and-twenty tints of Tyrian purple. When you dipped the first time a pale rose colour came and when you dipped a twenty-fifth time it was the colour of a black poppy.' (Frances Horner, Time Was, 1933, p.139) He sought to emulate the illuminations in this book and the colour of its paper. There are similar pictures in various private collections and at the British Museum, Ashmolean in Oxford, in the Cecil French Bequest and the Owens Art Gallery in New Brunswick. Two related drawings, dated 1896 (both at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) depict the central pair of figures and the embracing girls on the left. The first of these was used by Robert Catterson Smith for a repousse silver plaque shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition of 1896. Dancing Girls was based upon a design made in 1895 but subsequently abandoned, for The Book of Fowles in the Kelmscott Chaucer, published in 1896. Sotheby's 2013
Sotheby's are incorrect above: Frances Horner's autobiography is entitled "Time Remembered" pub 1933. The chapter in the Kelmscott Chaucer is entitled "The Parlement of Foules".
This is a variant drawing on an earlier design, circa 1895, which Burne-Jones abandoned as an illustration for The Book of Fowles in the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896. The two central figures appear in an earlier drawing, signed and dated 1896, exhibited at the Lady Lever art gallery, Port Sunlight, in 1948, no. 62. This design was adapted by R. Catterson Smith for a repoussé silver plaque shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 1896, reproduced in The Studio, vol. IX, p. 119