Rossetti used model, Alexa Wilding to paint this work for F. R. Leland. He wrote, describing it as: “the girl is in a sort of passionate reverie, and is drawing her hand listlessly along the strings of a violin, which hangs against the wall, while she holds the bow with the other hands, as if arrested by the thought of the moment, when she was about to play. In colour, I shall make the picture a study of varied greens.”
