head of Philip Comyns Carr (b.1874), looking down, aged 7: study for a chorister in 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid'

This portrait drawing of the young Philip Comyns Carr served as the model for the head of the right hand chorister in King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Tate Britain). Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884, that painting became Burne-Jones's most successful work of the 1880s, and was called the 'picture of the year' by The Art Journal (June 1884, p. 189). Illustrating the legend of King Cophetua, who fell in love at first sight with the beggar Penelophon. The tale came from an Elizabethan ballad published in Bishop Thomas Percy's 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and was retold in a sixteen-line poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1842. Burne-Jones had begun working on the subject with an 'unsatisfactory' oil in 1861-2, before returning to it in earnest in 1883.

Philip Comyns Carr sat to Burne-Jones in 1883 for a portrait in oil, and the present drawing was probably made during those sittings. His father, Joseph Comyns Carr (1849-1916), was a lawyer turned journalist who in 1873 became the art critic for the Pall Mall Gazette. He was a champion of contemporary artists, and particularly of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and was a great friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1877 Comyns Carr was appointed co-director of the Grosvenor Gallery, the spiritual home of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, before leaving in 1887 and founding the New Gallery, taking most of the artists with him. He, and his costume designer wife, Alice, became great friends of many of the artists who exhibited there. Alice was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1889.