William Holman Hunt, O.M., R.W.S. (London 1827-1910)

Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873) was the son of the landscape painter William Collins and the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, the novelist. Though a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly intimate with Millais, he was never actually a member. Despite some success, in the later 1850s he abandoned painting for writing, and in 1860 he married Kate Dickens, the novelist's youngest daughter.

Judith Bronkhurst observes that the drawing was made at about the time Hunt started to talk of going to the East, and 'may therefore have been undertaken for its memento value'.