A Study of Willie Graham (1858-1875) on his deathbed signed lower left in monogram pencil on paper 16.5 x 23.5 cm Footnote: Provenance: William Graham (1817-1885), his daughter Agnes Jekyll (1861-1937), and thence by direct family descent to the late owner Literature: Oliver Garnett, 'The Letters and Collection of William Graham - Pre-Raphaelite Patron and Pre-Raphaelite Collector', in The Walpole Society , 2000, p. 298, no. c86, illustrated on p. 154, fig. 91 Willie (William) Graham was the younger son and the 6th child of William Graham (1817-1885) by his wife Jane Catherine Lowndes of Arthurlie, Renfrewshire. William Graham Senior was a successful merchant and became a distinguished patron of contemporary artists, particularly Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Millais. The Grahams were at Strathallan Castle in Perthshire – which they had taken for the summer – when young Willie died tragically from an overdose of cold mixture containing morphia. Millais was staying nearby at Erigmore House, Birnam, and so was able to be there to record the tragedy and let the family have this ‘memento’ of Willie. Willie’s elder sister Frances (later Frances Horner) recalled of the tragic day in her memoirs Time Remembered , published in 1933, p. 46: “There one day in September, on the morning when Willie was due to return to Eton, I found him in his room unconscious and breathing stertorously. We got the local doctor and did all we could, but he never regained consciousness and died in my arms an hour or two after I had gone in to him…Willie was at Mr Dalton’s house at Eton. He was very good-looking, very musical, and a great favourite with everyone at school and at home. His was a sunny nature, with that sort of purity of heart that one sees in some schoolboys, and which no evil seems to sully.” The loss of both his sons, Rutherford in 1872 from diphtheria and then Willie in 1875 was a devastating blow from which the father never fully recovered. Georgiana Burne-Jones in her Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones published in 1904 wrote: ''The father’s faith and patience were immoveable under this sorrow, and when we first saw him afterwards, we found him just as gentle, kind and thoughtful about every one else as in the days when he had happiness to spare'' (vol II, p. 62). William Graham Senior himself wrote on 17th September 1875 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti ''My dear Rossetti. / You will I know feel for us and with us in the terrible loss. / Our darling's was the loveliest and most innocent life I ever knew in the world and the promise of its / future was very fair. Our Heavenly Father has taken him away from the soiling of it and the sorrow which / future years must have brought and it is well with him altho a sore [blow] to us" (Garnett, p. 227) William Graham had formed also a great collection of Old Masters from the mid-1860s onwards, particularly of early Italian gold ground paintings. A sale of most of his old masters and also works by the contemporary artists he had patronised, was held after his death at Christie's in 1886.