This composition is one that Burne-Jones toyed with over a long period. It is an integral part of The Passing of Venus (see cat. nos. 99-101), but does not appear in the version of that subject which forms part of the background to Laus Veneris (cat. no. 63), where the figure of Cupid is a winged putto. A kneeling young male nude Cupid, bending his bow downward, appears in the central panel of the Pyramus and Thisbe triptych of 1872-76 (Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead). A first nude study of the central figures of the new composition is to be found in the Perseus sketchbook (cat. no. 98), dating from 1875, but it was not until 1880 that a mono- chrome painting in oil was begun, to be exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery two years later. This was bought by Constantine Alexander Ionides, and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 1 Malcolm Bell, in his 1892 monograph on Burne-Jones, described this as a "charming fancy ... in low tones of grey and green [in which] the God of Love, blind- folded and fitting an arrow to his bow, steps down among a bevy of damsels, nude and draped, by a riverside, one of whom lies crouched upon the ground beneath his very feet, while the others turn to escape." 2 Burne-Jones must have been aware that such a static and formalized image would benefit from three-dimensional treat- ment, and at the same time he had it executed, probably by his junior studio assistant Matthew Webb (ca. 1851-1924), as a low-relief panel in gesso; his record of work for 1880 lists "Cupids hunting ground, in raised work, gilded and stained. Same subject in Terra Verte." This was apparently a commis- sion from Sir Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, later Duke of Westminster, who had origi- nally requested a similar treat- ment of The Triumph of Love (The Passing of Venus) in 1878. On the Grosvenor panel (now in the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington) the faces are left flat and painted in detail, the oil coloring extending also to the gesso itself, heightened with gold. 3 The Chicago watercolor, which has been dated to 1885, shows some vari- ations of detail, notably in reverting to a nude Cupid; the Cupid in the Grosvenor panel wears gilded armor. 1. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Ionides 9; 39 x 30 in.); see Basil S. Long, Victoria and Albert Museum: Catalogue of the Constantine Alexander Ionides Collection (London, 1925), p. 9. A more finished male nude study for Cupid, hold- ing a bow, was sold at Christie s, New York, January 7, 1981, lot 241. 2. Bell 1892 (1898), p. 55. 3. See Delaware Art Museum collec- tion (1978), pp. 42-43.