This is DGR's final “double work” and it was left uncompleted, at least on the pictorial side. The work
is quintessential Rossetti and stands in the closest relation to another pair of key, unfinished works:
Correspondence
DGR made two composition studies for his planned painting in 1875.
On his deathbed DGR dictated the sonnets to Hall Caine and sent them in a letter to Watts (5 April 1882)
(see Fredeman, Correspondence
DGR's letter to Madox Brown of 9 March 1875 shows the date of the drawing: “I have been making a design— all men and a sphinx!”.
For DGR's commentaries on the symbolism of the picture see
the notes here on the
The sonnets were first published from the manuscript in volume 4 of the Doughty-Wahl edition of DGR's
Letters
Surtees
Collected Writings
Marillier observes that the sonnets were intended to be included in a “miscellany of poems and tales by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts,” with the drawing to serve as a frontispiece to the book.
WMR comments that the dying youth in the picture is a coded recollection of Oliver Madox Brown, whose death in
1874 greatly affected DGR (see his sonnet
The Pre-Raphaelites
DGR: An Illustrated Memorial
DGR as Designer and Writer
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A Catalogue Raisonné
Visions of Love and Life