Annie French was one of the Glasgow Girls, a group of women artists and designers active in Glasgow at the turn of the 20th century that also included Helen Paxton Brown and Jessie M King, who also illustrated the same fairy-tale subject. This drawing was gifted by the Orcadian artist Stanley Cursiter, while Director of the National Galleries of Scotland (1930–48). At the time, the collection rarely accepted works by living artists and it would be another 17 years before the Gallery of Modern Art was formally established. In pencil at the top of the sheet are the partly erased words ‘EX LIBRIS ANNIE FRENCH’, meaning ‘book of or library of’ in Latin, suggesting this may have been a decorative bookplate pasted into a book.