Until its re-emergence on the London market in 1998 this handsome life-size drawing had not been seen in public since it was exhibited at the memorial show of Burne-Jones’s drawings mounted by the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1899. Entitled Portrait Study and dated about 1868-9, the sitter was the cultured, dynamic and slightly eccentric Euphrosyne Cassavetti. A woman of strong personality, nicknamed ‘the Duchess’, Madame Cassavetti commissioned several pictures from Burne-Jones. She was the mother of Maria Zambaco, the talented sculptress and ravishing beauty with whom Burne-Jones conducted a tempestuous affair in the late 1860s. Our drawing was owned by Euphrosyne’s nephew, Constantine Alexander Ionides, the great patron of the English Aesthetic Movement, whose collection of over a thousand pictures was left to the Victoria and Albert Museum.