In 1897 Burne-Jones’s protégé Robert Catterson-Smith – a silversmith, painter and illustrator – exhibited a hammered silver plaque, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the New Gallery, the opening of which was clouded by the death of William Morris. It was based on a similar design, and showed dancing female figures. It is likely that Burne-Jones made the drawings first, and that Catterson-Smith made his plaques after seeing them. He and Burne-Jones had collaborated before, with Morris, preparing Burne-Jones’s illustrations for the Kelmscott Chaucer (published in 1896 and later described by WB Yeats as ‘the most beautiful of all printed books’). Then a relatively unknown artist, Catterson-Smith worked from photographs of Burne-Jones’s delicate illustrations, tracing over and embellishing them, in order to make them conform to the thick, mediaeval woodcut style designs Morris envisaged for his books. There is another very similar version of this drawing in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which Stephen Wildman described in the catalogue to the 1998 exhibition Edward Burne-Jones, Victorian Artist-Dreamer: ‘This is a fine example of a particular type of Burne-Jones’s exotic late drawings, in gold on a rich ground, like “the colour of a black poppy” he had admired in a Byzantine Gospel book. Along with another, similar drawing, also formerly in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, it takes up one of the artist’s abiding delights, the effect of clinging drapery on female figures, which he so admired in early Renaissance art’ (pp 331-2). Burne-Jones later drew the same two girls with four others, all dancing, in a larger gold drawing on a purple base, dated 1898. Wildman noted that Burne-Jones ‘was beginning to use gold paint on dark backgrounds on a regular basis as early as 1890, when he made up for exhibiting no oil paintings at the New Gallery by submitting some spectacular works on paper [including] four “Designs in Gold”, one of them on a red ground …. While making one such drawing on April 22, 1897, he inadvertently smudged it, then told Rooke: “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.”’ (ibid. pp 330-1)