George Du Maurier has long been considered one of the finest of the talented draughtsmen working for the comic newspaper Punchin the late 19th century. An exact contemporary of William Morris and fellow-student with James McNeill Whistler in Paris, Du Maurier became the keenest critic of the Pre-Raphaelite / Aesthetic cult whilst remaining friends with many members of the circle.

At the height of public interest in the Aesthetic Movement, between the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery in London at the end of the 1870s and Oscar Wilde's lecture tour of 1882, Punchran a brilliant series of caricatures by Du Maurier satirising the manners and poses of the Aesthetes. He invented a cast of characters centred on Mrs Cimabue Brown, an ambitious hostess with 'artistic' tastes, Maudle, a rising painter, and the soulful poet Jellaby Postlethwaite, closely modelled on Wilde. Mrs Brown collects Aesthetes as others collect paintings and Du Maurier makes fun of both her social pretensions and her gullible enthusiasm for fashionable crazes such as that for lilies and oriental blue and white china.

This is the last drawing in the series. In the witty, almost 'post-modern' caption, Du Maurier finally dispatches his narcissistic trinity: 'Collapse of Postlethwaite, Maudle, and Mrs Cimabue Brown, on reading in a widely circulated contemporary journal that they only exist in Mr Punch's vivid imagination. They had fondly flattered themselves that universal fame was theirs at last'.