The drawing is a study for the head of the boy in The Prioress's Tale (Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington), one of two pictures that Burne-Jones exhibited at the New Gallery in the summer of 1898, shortly before his death on the night of 16 June that year. The picture illustrates Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, which is set in a city in Asia and tells of a widow's son who has a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. He is murdered by the Jews but the Virgin lays a grain of corn on his tongue and he continues to sing her praises even after death. Burne-Jones's design, in which the Virgin is seen placing the grain of corn on the boy's tongue while his companions go to school in the busy townscape beyond, was conceived as decoration for the wardrobe which he painted as a wedding present for Jane and William Morris in 1858 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). The painting was begun in the 1869, but then abandoned until it was taken up and completed in 1898. Edward Horner, the model for the boy, was the son of Frances Horner, whose father, William Graham, Liberal Member of Parliament for Glasgow and a noted connoisseur, was Burne-Jones's greatest patron. Renowned for her 'cleverness' and 'insight', Frances was the most prominent of the young women with whom Burne-Jones formed romantic, but platonic, relationships in later life. A leading member of the Souls, indeed according to Lady Paget 'the High Priestess' of that group, she appears in his picture The Golden Stairs (1880; Tate Gallery) and published many of his letters to her in her autobiography Time Remembered (1933). In 1883 she married (Sir) John Horner of Mells Park, Somerset, who became High Sheriff of the county in 1885 and Commissioner for Woods and Forests ten years later, retiring and being created KCVO in 1907. Edward was the elder of their two sons. Born in 1888, he was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford before training for the bar under F.E. Smith. On the outbreak of war he obtained a commission in the 18th Hussars, was posted to France and severely wounded at the second battle of Neuve Chapelle. When he had recovered, he served in Egypt before returning to his regiment in France, where he was killed at the battle of Cambrai in November 1917. A memorial to him, designed by Lutyens and bearing a bronze equestrian statue by Munnings, is in Mells Church, and his mother published tributes and a portrait drawing of him by Violet, Duchess of Rutland, dated 1909, in Time Remembered. The Souls suffered grievously from the deaths of their sons during the Great War. Raymond Asquith, the son of the Prime Minister, who married Edward Horner's sister Katharine, was another casualty. Very few studies for The Prioress's Tale are known, although a watercolour study for the Virgin was exhibited in The Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Draughtsmen, Fermoy Art Gallery, King's Lynn, 1971, no. 7. Burne-Jones also made a portrait drawing of Edward Horner's cousin Francis Jekyll in 1894; see Burne-Jones et l'influence des Préraphaélites, exh. Hartnoll & Eyre at Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris, 1972, no. 24, illustrated in catalogue.