This is an unusual memorial tablet, quite unlike the majority designed and made before this date. It is a coloured copy of a plain white plaster tablet designed by Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) in memory of his close friend Laura Lyttleton (née Tennant), who died in childbirth in 1886 within the first year of her marriage. The original was installed in the church of St Andrew in Mells, Somerset. The coloured version was made for Burne-Jones's own house, The Grange, Fulham. Burne-Jones had been studying Byzantine art. The peacock was a symbol of the Resurrection in Greek culture of the Christian era.
Lady Georgiana Burne-Jones described this tablet in her biography of her husband thus: - 'Laura, the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant: in our house she so fascinated us all that we called her The Siren"". [Her memorial] is eight feet high" and an effigy of a peacock which is the symbol of the Resurrection standing upon a laurel tree - and the laurel grows out of the tomb and burst through the side of the tomb with a determination to go on living and refusing to be dead and below was a Latin inscription made by Dean Church one of the many who loved her.'
Meanwhile, many smaller tasks claimed his attention. With the help of the firm of John Broadwood and Sons he attempted to re-form the Victorian grand piano, replacing its vulgar curves and bulges with a simpler, more chaste design based on the harpsichord (cat. no. 125). For some years from 1879 on he found himself producing designs for sculptural reliefs, the nearest to "taking to sculpture" he was to come. Some, commissioned by George Howard, were carried out in bronze by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, Sculptor in Ordinary to Queen Victoria (cat. nos. 122, 132). Others were realized in gesso. A rectangular design of the Hesperides was repeated for the front of a cassone and as an overmantel for the Lewises' country "cottage" at Walton-on-Thames. 81 But his most ambitious work in this medium was a large memorial to Laura Lyttelton (fig. 100), a much-loved young "Soul" who died in childbirth in 1886. Representing a peacock seated on a laurel bush bursting from a tomb, a symbol of resurrection, it was one of three funerary monuments that he designed about this time. In 1885 he devised a simple headstone to mark William Graham's grave in the Glasgow necropolis, and when Leyland died seven years later he fashioned for him a handsome sar- cophagus in Brompton cemetery. Even in death these two munificent patrons maintained their characteristic styles with his assistance.