The present work is a small watercolour rich in atmosphere by Victorian painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, who was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, although never one of its core members.

Born into a wealthy Yorkshire family, Stanhope was the second son of John Spencer Stanhope and Lade Elizabeth Coke, whose grandfather was the Earl of Leicester of Holkham Hall, Norfolk, which still boasts a spectacular art collection. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford but was dedicated to becoming an artist. He was apprenticed to George Frederick Watts in the 1850s and through Watts, first met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunter and Charles Allston Collins in 1857. Rossetti invited him to join his mural project at the Oxford Union with scenes from the Morte d’Arthur. This in turn introduced Stanhope to Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and in a similar vein, his chosen subjects were mythological, allegorical or biblical painted in a carefully constructed, sumptuous and detailed manner. Burne-Jones described him as ‘the greatest colourist of the century' (A.M.W. Stirling, A Painter of Dreams, London, 1916, p.334).

Stanhope exhibited widely in the 1860s: the Royal Academy; at the Liverpool Academy and the Royal Manchester Institution; and at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he showed alongside the younger avant-garde artists loosely associated as the ‘Poetry without Grammar’ school, including Simeon Solomon. He was also chosen by Sir Coutts and Lady Blanche Lindsay to show at the opening of the famous Grosvenor Gallery, an alternative rival to the Royal Academy and an event which established the renown notably of his friends Watts and Burne-Jones.

One of Stanhope’s most famous commissions was for the chapel at Marlborough College, comprising twelve large paintings, commissioned by his friend and architect George Frederick Bodley.

Having regularly travelled to Florence and buying the Villa Nuti just outside the city in 1873, he moved their permanently in 1880 until his death in 1908.