Andromeda stands against the rock with her wrists chained behind her, her weight on her rightleg, her other foot drawn in beside it. Her head has dropped to one side and her eyes are closed. A wind off the sea lifts her hair in long dark strands and throws one lock forward over her shoulder. Poynter has executed the drawing with black chalk on warm-toned paper, allowing the colour of the sheet to stand for flesh. The rock is build up in broad, rubbed passages of shadow, against which the body is pale and still.

The narrative is drawn from Ovid’s fourth book of the Metamorphoses in which Andromeda, made to answer for her mother’s boasting, is chained to a rock on the Ethiopian coast as an offering to the sea monster, Cetus. Other sources tell how Andromeda’s mother Queen Cassiopeia had claimed she surpassed the Nereids in beauty, invoking the wrath of the sea god Poseidon. The oracle of Ammon told King Cepheus his kingdom would be spared only if his daughter were surrendered to the Cetus.

Perseus, flying home after beheading Medusa, sees Andromeda from the air, bargains with her parents for her hand and kills the beast. From the Renaissance onwards the legend was a recurring subject, giving painters classical sanction for the female nude.

Poynter came to the subject through decorative work. His reputation had hitherto rested on archaeologically detailed scenes of antiquity, such as Faithful unto Death of 1865 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Israel in Egypt of 1867 (Guildhall Art Gallery). In 1868, he included a nude Andromeda among his designs for the tiled Grill Room of the South Kensington Museum, now the Poynter Room. That design became the basis of a small upright oil, Andromeda, signed and dated 1869 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year (no. 137). It appears to have been the first nude he showed in public. Reviewing the 1870 exhibition, the Art Journal praised the grace of the painting’s line and the quiet tragedy of the turned head, and likened the wind-blown scarf to the drapery of Ariadne in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London). The picture was bought by Charles Edward Lees of Oldham and stayed with his descendants until 1970.

Among those who admired Andromeda at the Academy was Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, third Baron Wharncliffe (created Earl of Wharncliffe in 1876), who was then remodelling the ground floor of Wortley Hall, his seat near Sheffield. In March 1870 he had consulted his friend John Everett Millais on colour schemes for the new interiors, and in June 1871 he asked him to recommend a painter for two dragon-slaying subjects in the billiard room. Millais proposed Poynter, and in August the commission was settled at £800 for the pair, each canvas to measure five feet by thirteen. Poynter began with Perseus and Andromedaand worked quickly enough to send it to the Academy in 1872, where it hung as no. 505.

Poynter was uneasy about placing a nude in a country house. At the Academy of 1870 his Andromeda had hung in the same gallery as Millais’s The Knight Errant, in which a knight cuts free a naked woman bound to a tree; the large canvas was severely criticised, while Poynter’s small picture passed without censure. The difference has been attributed partly to scale, a nude in a cabinet picture being more readily tolerated than one approaching life-size, and partly to the classical subject. As the Wortley picture would bring an unclothed woman of considerable size into a private house, on 18 December 1871 Poynter wrote to ask whether Wharncliffe objected to ‘the naked figure of Andromeda’. He added that he much preferred not to cover any part of it with drapery, since the design would suffer were the figure cut in two. Wharncliffe raised no objection, and Andromeda was left undraped.

When Perseus and Andromeda went on view in 1872, reviewers praised Andromeda herself and it occasioned no complaint of impropriety. The Art Journal received the work warmly, although its critic judged the hero too slender for his task. Poynter went on retouching the painting for several months after the Academy closed and did not pronounce it finished until the end of the year.

Its companion, The Fight between More of More Hall and the Dragon of Wantley, taken from an old ballad set in the neighbourhood, followed in 1873. Wharncliffe next ordered a second pair for the opposite end of the billiard room, Atalanta’s Race, shown in 1876, the year of Poynter’s election as a full Academician, and Nausicaa and her Maidens playing at Ball of 1879. In 1881 Poynter’s full-length portrait of his patron was set above the chimneypiece. By then Poynter had taken charge of the decoration as a whole. He had recommended his neighbour Walter Crane, but Crane’s proposals were abandoned after delays, and Poynter devised instead a setting in the Renaissance manner, with painted ornament, plasterwork, carving and stained glass. The scheme was completed in August 1883, twelve years after the first pair was agreed.

All four Wortley subject pictures were destroyed during the Second World War; only the portrait of Wharncliffe survives, now in Sheffield Museums. Perseus and Andromeda is known today through photographs, an oil sketch sold at Sotheby’s in March 1971, a large compositional drawing in charcoal and coloured chalks at Rugby School and a handful of studies of individual figures and details. One, a black chalk study of Perseus’s head inscribed and dated 1872, was shown by Poynter at the Dudley Gallery’s Black and White Exhibition in 1878, priced at fifteen guineas. It reappeared in Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites and their Century at Peter Nahum in 1989.

The present sheet isolates the standing Andromeda and is carried to a high degree of finish. It differs from the 1869 oil: the blue scarf that blows about the figure there is absent, and the hair, bound up in the earlier picture, streams loose. The finish owes much to Poynter’s training. He had studied in Paris in the late 1850s under the Swiss academic painter Charles Gleyre, and in 1871 became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College London, where he made drawing from the life the basis of the teaching. He exhibited such studies as works in their own right, as the Perseus at the Dudley Gallery shows. Many contemporaries regarded him as the foremost academic draughtsman in England, and in 1914 Walter Sickert placed his work in the dwindling class of ‘real drawings’.

A study of Andromeda’s head for the same composition is in the British Museum, and both sheets are recorded as drawn from Antonia Caiva, one of the Italian models most sought after in London studios during the 1870s. She sat to Leighton and to Burne-Jones, whose nude studies for The Golden Stairs (Tate Britain, 1880) were made from her; one is inscribed with her name, a rare instance of a Victorian model identified on the sheet itself. Burne-Jones recalled her ‘splendour and solemnity’. Of her subsequent life almost nothing is known beyond a note she sent him from hospital, saying that she was poor and ill.

In about 1876 William Henry Doeg bought the drawing from the artist, with a group of works that also contained the oil sketches for Perseus and Andromeda and Atalanta’s Race, and it descended in the family until 1992. In 1993 it was with Colnaghi in London, from whom it passed to a collector in New York. Julian Freeman reproduced it in his catalogue of the exhibition Life at Arm’s Length, held at Brighton College in 1995. It was sold at Christie’s in 2001 and passed through the London dealer Neville Keating to Hartmuth Jung, who built an esteemed collection which was sold at Christie’s in 2021 as a dedicated auction: Pre-Raphaelites to Symbolists.

The Wortley Hall group of paintings was widely regarded as Poynter’s greatest achievement in ‘high art’ – their loss in the Second World War makes this work both a valuable record of the lost commissions and witness to Poynter’s exceptional draughtsmanship.