Hero is a work of 1871 and one of a small group of single chalk drawings of named classical and literary heroines that Sandys made in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and relates also to an oil painting whose location is subsequently unknown. These works were made after a turbulent period for Sandys following his Royal Academy controversy of 1868 and rupture with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in June 1869, when his studio practice of the high Pre-Raphaelite period gave way to the disciplined chalk drawings on which his late reputation rests.

In May 1868, the Royal Academy’s hanging committee accepted Sandys’ Medea (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery) and then withdrew it on the eve of the show, leading to outcry from Sandys supporters and public debate in the press. The Morning Press, protested the exclusion of the painting writing: "We have reason to know that Mr. F. Sandys, one of our best draughtsmen, if not our very best, has sent in a picture of Medea, which though originally accepted, was finally rejected. The exclusion is utterly indefensible.’ Owing to the controversy, the following year in 1869 it was re-accepted and hung in the Academy exhibition.

In June that year, Rossetti accused Sandys, in a letter that has not survived in full but whose terms are recorded in W. M. Rossetti’s diary, of taking compositional ideas from him without permission, and the friendship was suspended for six years. The events together shut Sandys out of the London circles in which he had moved since 1857. His response was to move to Norwich, where his sister Emma Sandys (1841-1877) was already at work in the same Pre-Raphaelite vein, and to turn primarily from oil paintings to coloured chalks. In 1871, Sandys’s three exhibits at the Royal Academy were all Norwich subjects in chalk: a portrait of W. H. Clabburn of the great Norwich shawl-weaving family, a drawing of the children of J. J. Colman of Carrow Works, and a second Clabburn portrait.

The sitter of Hero is Marianne Shingles (later Mrs George Lewis, 1855-1933), a Norfolk silk-weaver whose family lived across Grapes Hill from the artist's house at North Walsham. He met her through his sister Emma for whom she posed regularly. She appears to have sat for Sandys on only two other occasions, in the oil La Belle Jaune Giroflée (1869, private collection) and a drawing Head of a Young Woman (c.1869). She poses here as Hero of Sestos, virgin priestess of Aphrodite who as told by Ovid in The Heroides, nightly lit the lamp by which her lover Leander swam the strait from Abydos. On a stormy night the lamp was extinguished and Leander drowned; in the morning, finding his body washed up at the foot of her tower, Hero cast herself down beside him.

The work demonstrates Sandys’ exceptional draughtsmanship. The line of nose, lip and chin is held in clear silhouette against bare paper; the cheek and neck are modelled in fine close-ranked chalk strokes; the eye is drawn in fully and the gaze fixed on the middle distance. Beautiful curls of hair are bound up at the crown by a fillet knotted behind, two long ribbons of which delicately descend the length of the neck and across the right shoulder.

Pure sanguine on cream paper had been the medium of the Florentine and Bolognese masters Sandys had studied at the British Museum print room throughout the 1850s. Its tone naturally gives the work a warmth of its own. He used both black and red chalks to dramatic effect in many celebrated drawings, including Study for Vivien (Norwich Castle Museum circa 1863), Miranda (1868, private collection), Medusa (c.1875, Victoria & Albert Museum), and the Oberlin Red Rose and White (1867, Allen Memorial Art Museum and the various versions of Proud Maisie.

Dating to the same year as the present work are two other chalk drawings of 1871, depicting his model and mistress Mary Emma Jones. The Coral Necklace, in coloured chalks (Cleveland Museum of Art), and Rose, Portrait of Mary Emma Jones (private collection). They form part of a series of works pre-occupied with single profiles portraits and demonstrate why Rossetti once dubbed Sandys ‘the greatest living draughtsman.’