Henry James Holiday (1839-1927)

This drawing was part of a larger sheet headed The Rameses, alongside another figure study of a woman in a similar dress. Holiday designed the costume for Rameses in Walter Crane's 1899 masque, Beauty's Awakening, performed by the Art Worker's Guild at the Guildhall, and it seems likely that these designs were for costumes for his attendants.
Holiday also used this pose with a different costume for one of the figures in the Apollo and the Muses frieze that he designed for the Clifton Theatre (H. Holiday, Reminiscences of my Life, London, 1914, ill. opposite p.114), and again with slight adjustments for one of the figures in his Moses Leaving the Court of Pharaoh stained glass window (versions in Durham Cathedral and Richmond, Virginia).