The painting depicts a scene from the Arthurian legend about the infatuation of Merlin with the Lady of the Lake, Nimue.

Merlin is shown trapped, helpless in a hawthorn bush as Nimue reads from a book of spells.

Another portrait of Zambaco was used as a reference to Alice resembling her, one of the characters in the 1991 novel King Solomon's Carpet by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine.

The Beguiling of Merlin was purchased by Lord Leverhulme in 1918 and remains in the Lady Lever Art Gallery to the present day.

[1] The painting features on the covers of the books Possession: A Romance (1990), by A. S. Byatt, and Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011).