Cinderella

Late in 1862 Burne-Jones designed tiles for the decorating firm William Morris had just founded, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, and two of them showed Cinderella on her own, once sweeping in rags and once as a queen. In 1863 he took the figure up again in this tall watercolour. She is back in the kitchen after the ball, in a green working dress mended with patches, an apron gathered in one hand, one foot bare and the other still in its slipper.

Behind her the shelves are stacked with blue-and-white plates and cups. In those years his friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler were caught up in a craze for collecting blue-and-white porcelain from China, and this Cinderella's scullery looks like the room of a London aesthete. It was among the first pictures he sent to the Old Water-Colour Society, London's senior watercolour exhibition, after he was elected an associate in 1864. In the winter of 1898, months after the painter's death, its owner, Arthur Edmund Street, lent it to the memorial exhibition of his work at the New Gallery in London.