This is a study the two women talking to a cardinal in Brown's painting 'Chaucer at the Court of Edward III' (1851, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). The figure on the left who has very few features drawn in is likely to have been an artist's dummy. Professional artists models were expensive and we know from Brown's diary we know that he borrowed lay figures from his friends and also hired them from 'Briggs & Barbe's' a company providing supplies to arists in London (Virginia Surtees, ed., 'The Diary of Ford Madox Brown,' p. 32). In 1848 when he visited his friend Daniel Casey in Paris he bought a lay figure, most likely from Lechertier Barber, one of the most famous makers of lay figures. In the final version the two women have been altered and the woman on the right in this study has become an older woman wearing a head scarf and a dress with a high neckline.LM

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