As Betty O'Looney observes in the catalogue of the Sandys exhibition held at Brighton and Sheffield in 1974, Sandys ceased to paint subject pictures in the late 1860s, although he continued to produce drawings with literary, historical and symbolist themes. These generally took the form of single female heads or half-length figures, bearing a loose relationship both with his own portrait drawings and to Rossetti's half-length compositions. The sitters were either professional models or, as they grew up, his daughters.

The White Mayde of Avenel exists in at least two other versions, a small drawing in pencil and gouache on vellum, dated 1902 and showing the figure half-length (private collection), and a chalk drawing of the head only, similar in scale to our drawings (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Both were included in the Sandys exhibition of 1974, nos. 161-2 (repr. in cat., pls. 120-1). Two drawing entitled The White Mayde of Avenel were included in Sandys' retrospective exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1904, and one of these may have been our drawing. The same exhibition included a drawing called The White Ladie of Avenel, which was subsequently sold at Christie's by Frederick Anthony White, FSA, on 18 December 1925, lot 27. This again had the same dimensions (13 x 10in.), but it can hardly have been our drawing since the medium was black and white chalk.

The literary source for the drawings, if any, does not seem to have been identified