Love Among the Ruins (Burne-Jones)

The work depicts two lovers in blue robes, a man and a woman, seated together on a stone capital amid the ruins of buildings.

When sold at Christie's in 2013, the lot essay identified the models as the Italians Alessandro di Marco and Antonia Caiva.

It was made from watercolour mixed with gouache and gum arabic, giving it a finished appearance resembling an oil painting.

Writing later, Julia Cartwright has said it was "one of the master's most perfect and beautiful creations", and Malcolm Bell called it "the most impressive of the painter's works, with its vague hint of an untold tragedy that haunts the memory".

After Burne-Jones' 1884 painting King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid was a great success at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Love Among the Ruins was lent for exhibition at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1893.

While back in Paris, the prominent label warning that it was a watercolour and so susceptible to water damage was ignored, and an egg white wash was applied at the Goupil Gallery as a temporary varnish while the painting was being prepared for reproduction in photogravure.

At the suggestion of the owner and his former assistant Charles Fairfax Murray, Burne-Jones was eventually persuaded in 1898 to attempt a restoration, using ox gall to remove the egg white and then repainting the damaged head of the woman.

Distraught that his treasured watercolour was irretrievably damaged in Paris in 1893, Burne-Jones immediately painted a second version in oils, which was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1894.

Inherited by his son Walter Samuel, 2nd Viscount Bearsted, it was donated to the National Trust in 1948, since when it has been exhibited among the Arts and Crafts interior décor and Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Geoffrey Mander at Wightwick Manor, in Wolverhampton.