The premiere of The Blue Bird by the Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was held in December 1909 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, where it was staged by Herbert Trench and his colleague Lord Howard de Walden. Unlike some of Maeterlinck's more avant-garde plays of the 1890s, it was a sensational success and ran to 402 performances. It has a fantastical plot: The children of a woodcutter, Mytyl and Tyltyl, fall asleep and in the ensuing dream sequence, pass through the Land of Memory, the Palace of the Night and the Kingdom of the Future in pursuit of the Blue Bird (a stand-in for happiness), who ultimately saves the life of their neighbour's dying child.

London audiences who thought they were going to see another Christmas play for children like Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (J.M. Barrie, 1904), or Pinky and the Fairies (W.G. Robertson, 1908) were much mistaken, for The Blue Bird was aimed at adults of all ages and carried a hefty mystical charge. More than any playwright of his day, Maeterlinck's imagery was derived from paintings by artists he knew personally. He owned reproductions after Burne-Jones and Walter Crane, the sets for his play The Intruder, staged as a benefit for Gauguin and Verlaine in 1891, were designed by Vuillard, and the sets for his play L'Interieur (1895) were designed by Maurice Denis. It may be to the Belgian painter William de Nuncques that The Blue Bird owes its distinctive blue palette (Maeterlinck wrote to him in 1895 to ask him for a reproduction of one of his haunting pictures in blue twilight). The decision to hire the relatively unknown and inexperienced young artists Frederick Cayley Robinson and Sidney Sime to design the sets was likely made by Trench and Lord Howard de Walden, but Maeterlinck was probably involved in the decision, and he certainly approved of the result: 'A charm,' he told Robinson, 'powerful, unexpected and much more fairy-like than most spontaneous fantasies of the most extravagant imagination, escapes, little by little, from your pictures, purposely restrained and subdued. You have interpreted the story from within' (quoted in Stevens, Frederick Cayley Robinson, The Connoisseur, 1977).

Robinson's illustrations for the 1911 edition of The Blue Bird are closely related to his set designs. The subject of this watercolour is from Act V, in 'The Kingdom of the Future', for which Maeterlinck set the scene: '… in the immense halls of the Azure Palace, where the children wait that are yet to be born. … everything, from the light and the lapis-lazuli flagstones to the shimmering background … everything down to the smallest objects, is of an unreal, intense, fairy-like blue. … supernatural, luminous blue. Amongst the children waiting to be born are 'the Lovers', who '… spend the day looking into each other's eyes, kissing and bidding each other farewell …' for 'it seems they will not be able to leave together…'.

Its first owner was a young artist who bought it from the Leicester Galleries in 1911 — Duncan Grant.