This intriguing painting came from the family of a Danish physiotherapist/masseur practising in London, Valdemar Lorentzen, who treated Philip Burne-Jones (the son of Edward). At times, his back problems could be so debilitating that he was forced into a wheelchair. Their relationship was evidently not only professional, it seems, for Philip gave this painting to Lorentzen, left him £100 in his will and gave him one of his own paintings, Self-criticism of 1892 – the prime version of which, An Unfinished Masterpiece, is in Touchstones, Rochdale. After his death, the unmarried Lorentzen left everything to his sister Louise Madsen in Denmark, and Lorentzen's family have traditionally believed that the sitter of our picture was Philip, but there perhaps is not enough resemblance in the face for that to be so. A photograph of Lorentzen does bear some resemblance to the sitter, suggesting it could even be the masseur himself. The colour and layout of the surroundings, the red curtains and teal door, resemble The Grange in Fulham, the Burne-Jones family home until 1898.

The initials 'RB' are those probably of Rupert Bunny, the Australian painter who in 1898 was part of the 'set' at the St John's Wood School of Art 'which included a good many people now known to fame, for example Mr Philip Burne Jones; Mr [Edward Tennyson] Reed, of "Punch"; Mr [Ralph] Peacock … Mr Rupert Bunny, and Miss Frances Forbes Robertson' (Dublin Daily Nation, 1898). Bunny studied there from 1884 for 18 months, during which time Philip, who was four years older than Bunny, was a frequent visitor. Philip had many friends and acquaintances in the theatre and amongst artists generally, but he also had several intense male friendships (for example with E.F. Benson and John Bellingham Brooks), and Bunny did too, despite his marriage in 1902, the year in which Philip left England to spend a year in America, 'travelling with a quite particularly shady set of people. Most of them looked as if their only reason for going was to escape the strong arm of the law', as his sister Margaret commented (quoted in Flanders, A Circle of Sisters, 2001). Virginia Woolf penned a bleak vignette of Philip in her Diaries in 1912 when she saw him sitting alone in evening dress in St Mark's Square in Venice:

Phil was a kind of dissipated degenerate, spending all the thousands that were paid for those wan women on staircases, on love affairs, on luxuries, on being a fashionable bachelor & fairy God father to the Trees & Taylors & other fashionable young ladies — a very timid conventional man at bottom.

This splashy, intimate portrait was probably painted in the late 1890s, by which time Bunny, who had been studying and painting in Paris, had evolved a freer, more direct manner of painting than he had learnt in London. Perhaps Lorentzen was a friend to both artists.