Edward Burne-Jones - Studies for ‘The Backgammon Players’, possibly Fanny Cornforth

Pencil, 14 × 20⅛ ins

The drawing can be dated to 1861 on grounds of style, and the seated figure on the
left is almost certainly a study for the young woman in The Backgammon Players, a
large and highly-finished drawing in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which
bears this date. A study of the two players, a man and a woman, together was with
Hartnoll & Eyre in 1971, and is illustrated in the catalogue of the exhibition of
Burne-Jones drawings which they held jointly with the Piccadilly Gallery in June
that year, no. 2. The kneeling figure on the right in the present drawing has not been identified buy may be a study for a Virgin Annunciate, possibly in stained glass.

The woman in the finished version of The Backgammon Players has the unmistakable
features and dark hair of Jane Morris, but a different, blonde model seems to have
sat for both our drawing and the Hartnoll & Eyre study. A possible candidate is
D.G. Rossetti’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth, who was twenty-six in 1861. True, we
tend to think of Fanny as wordly, coarse-grained and sexually generous, but William
Michael Rossetti described her as having ‘regular and sweet features, and a mass of
the most lovely blonde hair, light golden of “yellow harvest”’ and it is not impossible that Burne-Jones has transformed her into the innocent, girlish creature we see in these drawings. Moreover, Fanny was undoubtedly sitting for him in 1861,
appearing (more appropriately) as the enchantress Nimue in the watercolour Merlin
and Nimue (Victoria & Albert Museum, London).