Sidonia the Sorceress was a perversely erotic witch-hunt novel first published in Germany in 1849 by Wilhelm Meinhold, translated into English by Lady Wilde under the pen name Speranza, later famous as the mother of Oscar Wilde^[1]. Dante Gabriel Rossetti brought the book to the attention of the circle gathered around Red Lion Square with, by one account, spectacular success, and is said to have called the novel's central witch, beautiful and sexually insatiable, a stunner^[1]. Georgiana Burne-Jones later gave a copy of the book to John Ruskin, sending an anxious letter as though unsure how he would receive it, and William Morris considered it one of his sacred books, eventually publishing his own edition through the Kelmscott Press in 1893^[1].

Burne-Jones painted the subject of Sidonia twice in 1860, drawn to the character's mixture of surface beauty and inner cruelty, a type of devious, outwardly lovely woman who recurs across the artistic and literary output of his immediate circle in this period^[1]. The novel's macabre, drawn-out plot, centred on Sidonia's manipulations and her use of beauty as a weapon, gave Burne-Jones a subject well suited to the darker, more psychologically charged register the group was exploring at the start of the 1860s, distinct from the brighter medievalism of some of the Brotherhood's earlier work.

Burne-Jones never trained at the Royal Academy Schools, and instead relied on free access to the National Gallery in London as the crucial resource for his self-education as a young painter still finding his way^[2]. For Sidonia, his first major work, he adopted the palette of Jan van Eyck directly, an extreme darkness offset by passages of white, a scheme he returned to elsewhere in his career, including in his later portrait of a young girl, Katie Lewis, where he again incorporated motifs drawn from close study of Flemish painting^[2]. Van Eyck remained a touchstone for Burne-Jones throughout his life; decades later he invoked the Flemish master again, this time to attack the Impressionists, singling out Manet's Olympia for particular scorn while praising Whistler as something closer to a modern van Eyck^[2].