One of the most important artists of the Celtic Revival, Phoebe Traquair was born and brought up in Dublin, where she studied at the School of Art. In 1872 she married and settled in Edinburgh, becoming deeply involved in the Edinburgh Arts and Crafts movement and a protégée of Patrick Geddes. She was astonishingly versatile, excelling as mural painter, illuminator, calligrapher, embroiderer, enameller and watercolourist. Her four-part needlework screen, based on Walter Pater's Denys l'Auxerrois and symbolising the spiritual life of man (1895-1902), is in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and some of her smaller paintings and exquisite illuminated manuscripts were included in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989. Drawings and watercolours are in the V&A.

The present picture is typical, with its esoteric symbolist imagery and a visual vocabulary owing much to the early Italians, Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. It is said that the angels at the top include likenesses of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and General Gordon. In 1887 Rossetti had been dead five years, Burne-Jones was at the peak of his career, and Gordon was recently martyred at Khartoum.