This is the earliest of Hunt's drawings inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ginevra, published 1824, and illustrates the finding of Ginevra’s corpse, with the doctor checking her pulse and a crouching figure holding a looking-glass over her face to see if she is still breathing. There is a very faint drawing on the same theme in the upper right-hand corner of the verso. Ginerva died immediately after her wedding, as the result of having been forced to marry the rich Gherardi instead of her lover Antonio. A further drawing from the same poem was also included in the 1969 Holman Hunt exhibition, number 100, plate 9 (Yale Centre of British Art).
The artist; thence by descent to: Mrs. Elizabeth Burt
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery and London, Victoria and Albert Museum, William Holman Hunt, (catalogue of the exhibition by Mary Bennett), 1969, page 66, number 99
Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II, number D11, illustrated page 7, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 2006