The studies are for two of the watchers in The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (Museum of Art, Ponce, Puerto Rico), the enormous canvas that Burne-Jones began in 1881 but left unfinished at his death seventeen years later. On stylistic grounds the drawing can be dated to the 1890s, but the studies do not correspond closely to any of the figures in the painting, suggesting that the artist was still contemplating radical revisions at a comparatively late stage