The New Gallery, where this picture was shown in 1909, was known as ‘the last ditch of the Pre-Raphaelites’. Echo hung amongst pictures by Southall, Anning Bell, Cayley Robinson, Evelyn de Morgan and Charles Shannon. Waterhouse had painted the legend of Echo and Narcissus, as told by Ovid, six years before for the Royal Academy. His lush treatment of the subject depicted the beautiful Echo ignored by Narcissus, who stares instead at his own reflection, self-infatuated. Frampton’s version is a bleaker image of Echo alone, luminous in a shadowy mountainous landscape. Narcissus has gone, wasted away, having gazed for the last time at his reflection, saying to himself ‘Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell.’ It was then that Echo, cursed by Juno (for being a chatterbox) to repeat the last words of other people’s sentences, chorused ‘Farewell, Farewell, Farewell...’. Her tense body, barely clothed in a diaphanous robe is delicately painted and powerfully expresses the exquisite yearning which her voice cannot. The cut flowers, the narcissi in her lap will fade away, like their namesake, with Echo herself, until all is silence. The forget-me-nots growing at her feet will live to bloom again.

Frampton was the son of a stained glass designer, and was brought up in Brighton, where he was a school friend of Aubrey Beardsley. He trained at Westminster School of Art, and worked for a period in his father’s studio. The greatest influence upon him was Burne-Jones - whose retrospective at the New Gallery 1898-99 ‘struck Reginald Frampton with the force of a very revelation, opening his eyes to the supreme possibilities of the human form in decoration.’ Rudolf Dircks, writing for The Art Journal, described Frampton as ‘an artist working very much in the spirit and method of the early Christian painters. Nothing is more outside the quick competitive temper of the prevailing modern spirit, and nothing is more in harmony with the spiritual beauty of the world of romance, imagination and symbolism in which Mr. Frampton’s art lives’ (1907, p 295).