This sketch. which may depict the daughters of Hesperus, keepers of the Tree of Gilden Apples in Greek mythology, has an unusually animated character. There are echoes of William Blake – whose work was especially admired by Rossetti and whose biography was written in the 1860s by Swinburne, both friends of Burne-Jones. The drawing may be connected with the projected series of illustrations to William Morris’s cycle of poems The Earthly Paradise (eventually published unillustrated 1868-70) of which one of the tales, The Golden Apples, is a re-working of the classical legend of Hercules’s voyage to the land of Hesperus to steal the fruit of the Tree of Golden Apples, guarded by a serpent and the daughters of Hesperus. There is however, a somewhat similar drawing in a mid-1880s sketchbook at the British Museum, so the present drawing may well be related to a later, unidentified project.
