In 1855, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, student friends at Oxford, decided to abandon their theological studies and become artists. They turned for guidance to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a leader of the recently disbanded Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853), a group that galvanized British painting by rejecting academic convention and sought to emulate the vividness and sincerity of art from before the time of Raphael.

The creative dialogue between Burne-Jones, Morris, and Rossetti was remarkable for its intensity, productivity, and duration, and stimulated fresh goals and styles that defined the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite art, in the key decades from the 1860s through the 1890s.