The first version of this work is the cabinet that the architect John P. Seddon had built to hold his professional drawings. As soon as Morris's new “Firm” was founded, Seddon arranged to have his new cabinet decorated by the Morris firm. Madox Brown suggested that the design motif should be a series of decorations such that the cabinet might have had had it been King René's honeymoon cabinet. Brown, Rossetti and Burne-Jones designed and painted the decorated panels for the cabinet. In Pollard's own description, these included “cusped arches and corbels at the top, with their spandrels enriched with the armorial bearings in circles, and delicately diapered surfaces and borderings, like those in the medieval manuscripts [Morris] was so fond of; and lastly, by preparing guilt backgrounds for the figures themselves, decorated with diapers of black lines and dots to secure a harmony of treatment throughout”.

The next year the same three artists made stained glass designs for the windows now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which include (from a design by DGR), (designed by Madox Brown), and and (both designed by Burne-Jones)—in each case, the same subjects each had taken up for the Seddon cabinet panels. “It is not known for what purpose the glass was made, but it may possibly have been for showing at the 1862 International Exhibition” ( Sewter, , 422 ).

Later still, in May 1864, Trist visited DGR and asked him to execute an oil painting version of the panel DGR had made. Trist wanted it to match the picture he had made of Madox Brown's cabinet panel. DGR wrote to Seddons some months later and asked him to remove the large cabinet panel that he had done “for Knewstub to copy”. This request was apparently met and the picture was completed on 1 September and given to Trist two days later (see Fredeman, , 64.61, 64.110, 64.117, 64.118, 64.123, 64.125 ). Surtees notes that “a copy (not by Rossetti) exists which may have been Knewstub's work” ( Surtees, , vol. 1, 101n. ).

King René I (René the Good), lived from 1409-1480. In 1419 he was married to Isabel, the daughter of Charles I, Duke of Lorraine. It was an arranged marriage, the king being ten years old and his wife nine. The first part of his reign was largely devoted to public affairs. It was not until after the death of Isabel (1453) that he turned to the cultivation of the arts for which he is so celebrated. This turn dates from 1454 when he married his second wife, Jeanne de Laval, daughter of Guy, Count of Laval.

If the honeymoon cabinet is imagined to have any connection to the king's actual life, it would have to be connected to his second marriage, not his first. But in fact the entire work is an imaginative construction built from the quasi-legendary status that the king and his court had acquired.

The work develops an imaginative presentation of the king's honeymoon cabinet. The object derives from Walter Scott's story , chapters 29-30, where the character of King René as a devoted patron of the arts is laid out. The king's realm in Provence is represented as a kind of Earthly Paradise, and as such is set in explicit contrast to the worldly kingdoms of England, France, and Burgundy. The panels on the cabinet do not represent scenes from the king's imagined honeymoon. Rather, they are allegorical figurations of the arts that the king patronized. As such, and in DGR's contemporary context, they are second-order symbolic forms, imaginations of what might have been represented on the king's cabinet if it ever existed.

Benedetti, , 250. Fredeman, , 64. 61, 110, 117, 118, 123, 125. Marillier, , 114. Parry, , 170. Radford, , 19. Seddon, , 1-16 . Sewter, , 422 Sewter, , 67 Surtees, , vol. 1, 101 (no. 175).