The photograph records a well-known drawing of Lizzie Siddal, made at Hastings in 1854 and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It must be one of the eight signed photographs of his works that Rossetti gave to Mrs Gilchrist when she and her son Herbert, an artist, called on him in Cheyne Walk late in 1879 to discuss a second edition of her husband Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake. Alexander Gilchrist had died in 1861, and Rossetti and his brother William Michael had helped his widow to prepare the book for publication two years later.