This is the original watercolour for the frontispiece to Frank Sidgwick's Legendary Ballads (Chatto and Windus, 1907), for which Byam Shaw designed ten plates. It would seem to be based on a painting of 1896 which Cole describes in his account of the artist's career: 'He was also painting a "Babes in the Wood", for which he had made a study in the previous summer of a bracken-clothed coombe. He was much amused by someone referring to it as "a fine bit of fern work" (Rex Vicat Cole, The Art and Life of Byam Shaw, 1932, p. 70)