Format: Autograph letter signed to Augusta, a model, 1p, on “Ivory” blindstamped paper, 17.9 x 11.3cm.
Text reads “The Grange Northend. My dear Augusta, Can you come & sit for me one day this week before Saturday? I am sorely pressed to finish a picture & should be so glad if you could: if a whole day is impossible you may have half a day or two hours – can you call or will you write and tell me? Yours very truly, E. Burne-Jones.”
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (English, 1833–1898) English painter in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, and designer associated with William Morris, moved to ‘The Grange’, North End Lane, Fulham, London, in 1867; “a roomy eighteenth-century house set in a large garden, that had once belonged to the novelist Samuel Richardson.”
His model Augusta was Augusta Jones (Anne Maria Jones b.1843), one of three sisters who modelled for artists in the 1860s. She was the subject of several sketches and two important Burne-Jones paintings: Princess Sabra and Astrologia, both 1865. Augusta seems to have ceased modelling in the later 1860s, perhaps when she married the designer and architect Frederick Vincent Hart. Ref: Burne-Jones CatRais; Sotheby’s.
Foxing to old folds.
