The painting illustrates the story of 'The King and the Beggar-maid", which tells the legend of the prince Cophetua who fell in love at first sight with the beggar Penelophon.

The tale was familiar to Burne-Jones through an Elizabethan ballad published in Bishop Thomas Percy's 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and the sixteen-line poem The Beggar Maid by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

[1] King Cophetua was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884 and became Burne-Jones's greatest success of the 1880s for its technical execution and its themes of power and wealth overborne by beauty and simplicity.

The painting is referenced in Chapter 4 of Anthony Powell's "Books do Furnish a Room", the tenth installment of "A Dance to the Music of Time", as a visual set-up for the confrontation between X Trapnel and Kenneth Widmerpool in the former's digs in bombed out Little Venice circa 1947.

In Julia, Peter Straub's first horror novel, Mark tells the title character that she has always reminded him of the beggar maid in the painting.