Girl, interrupted: study for Sponsa
de Libano. Photograph: Don McPhee
She looks as if she is whistling. But instead of a tune, her lips are blowing a breeze.
Edward Burne-Jones, who chose the 12-year-old Jewish girl as the model for his painting, Sponsa de Libano, told her to "look wild and blow with your lips", writes David Ward.
The finished work hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. But Burne-Jones's preliminary rusty chalk sketch of his cockney kid went on show yesterday on the other side of the Mersey, at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, for the first time in more than a decade.
It joins more than 30 other works in an exhibition of pre-Raphaelite drawings from the collections of National Museums Liverpool. Rarely seen because of their fragility, they reveal the creative process of the pre-Raphaelite brethren and their followers, according to gallery head Sandra Penketh.
"We see them working out ideas," she said. "The drawings also show how talented most were as draughtsmen."
One sketch by Ford Madox Brown is of a baby who appears in Work, his epic painting of Victorian life, now in the Manchester Art Gallery. The baby is Brown's own son Arthur, sketched shortly before he died of a brain infection. The red ribbons in the drawing change to mourning black in the painting.
Thankfully, intercity travel is not always required to see the evolution from drawing to painting: William Holman Hunt's small sketch of a goat, included in the show, would later take centre stage in one of the best-known pre-Raphaelite images - The Scapegoat, which hangs just outside the exhibition in the main gallery.
One comparison which very few would have been able to make before this exhibition is between an ink drawing, by a very young John Everett Millais, to illustrate the story of Cymon and Iphegenia, from Boccaccio's Decameron, and a large painting on the same theme, now on permanent display in the building.
"No one knew the drawing existed till it came up in a recent sale and it has never been on show before," said Ms Penketh. "We were able to buy it in 2005 with help from the Art Fund and Lord Leverhulme's charitable trust.
"It was done when Millais was 17 or 18, before the brotherhood came together and we can see him finding his way as a young artist before he started working in the true pre-Raphaelite style."
A quick sprint between drawing and the later painting next door reveals significant changes: a dog appears, a lyre disappears, Iphegenia goes topless and Cymon acquires a leopard-skin kilt.
The exhibition also includes the almost inevitable Rossetti portrait of his muse Jane Morris, this time as Pandora, and a lyrical watercolour of a stony-hearted, green-clad temptress by Marie Spartali Stillman, a sister on the fringes of the brotherhood.
