Burne-Jones first made this double tile design for Morris & Co in 1862/3, initially in the form of a simple monochrome pencil and wash drawing (24.5 x 12 cm, roughly the same size as ours) now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1546). It was part of a scheme for the labours of each month. The other months comprised two or three further designs by Burne-Jones, with the others by Rossetti, Madox Brown and Morris himself. Most of them represent a country pursuit appropriate to each month, e.g. sheep-shearing in June, sowing in November and reaping in July. Burne-Jones's design for a valentine's card in February therefore stands out from the others, not being a farming activity. He either didn't get the brief, or deliberately made it so. Burne-Jones usually did not work up his designs for Morris up in detail or colour. It seems probable that our worked up version was made by Burne-Jones for his wife Georgie, from whose estate it originally came (bought by David Gould), as a private valentine.

Stephen Wildman has suggested that the original idea for the whole scheme may have come from volume XVII of the Annals Archaélogiques, p265, published in Paris in 1857, where there was an illustrated article by Adolphe Napoléon Didron about the 12th century mosaic floor of Aosta Cathedral, featuring twelve designs for each month of the year, with very similar themes. The February image in the mosaic is of a peasant warming himself by a fire. Morris used all the designs for three projects, most notably for the architect GF Bodley when he was commissioned to completely redesign and decorate the interior of Queen’s Old Hall, Cambridge, a 15C chapel. Morris & Co was commissioned to supply tiles for the overmantel of a chimney in 1862/3, described as by Myers as 'the firm's most ambitious scheme of tile decoration'. Here, February has a brick background top left, and the colouring is different. These tiles may be predated by a set now in the William Morris Gallery (C216), which have additional small insets of the signs of the zodiac designed by Webb. The February tile from this set is also rather different in detail (the floral pattern of the dress) from our drawing. A third set, now lost, was made for a project in Norwich.