The subject is from a ballad, a song of yearning for lost times, by the chivalric poet François Villon. Rossetti published a translation of it in 1870 — with the refrain 'Where are the Snows of Yesteryear?' — to herald his own work, Poems. In the painting, the ladies of the poem are listed in the banner above the procession from right to left: Joan of Arc, Alice, Dante's Beatrice, Ermengarde of Maine, Blanche de Castille (the mother of Louis IX), Johanna, Queen of France, Abelard's Heloise, Alexander's Thaïs, Hipparchia, wife of Crates the Cynic, and Flora goddess of flowers. The picture was noticed in the Royal Academy of 1906 by the Evening Standard:

Mr Val Havers's 'Ballad of Dead Ladies' (no 588) is, perhaps, particularly welcome, with its red and gold and rosy grey — the high light and full colour of wreathed flowers upon the rosy gold of the flesh.

Havers was the son of the prominent painters Fred Morgan and Alice Havers, who married in 1872. He was born nine months later. Fred was not a good family man and soon began to stray. There were several transgressions (the housemaid Hetty Screwby was found sitting on his knee), but Fred was also violent and the couple divorced in 1889, when Val was 15. His mother died the year after, of an overdose of morphine, which she injected for neuralgia. Val took his mother's maiden name.