Painted, like the "Sidonia von Bork," while Burne-Jones was still under the influence of Rossetti, "The Enchantments of Nimue" is interesting as an example of his earliest methods. It was finished in 1861, but it was not exhibited until 1865, when it was hung in the Gallery of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours; it was bought for the South Kensington Museum in 1896. The painting shows how Nimue "caused Merlin to pass under a heaving-stone into a grave" by the power of her enchantments.] From that time onwards there was for him no looking back. The twenty years of preparation, which were spent mainly in ceaseless seeking after completer knowledge and in careful study of the practical details of his profession, were followed by another twenty years of strenuous production, in which he worked out more and more effectively the ideas formed in his extraordinarily active mind. In the series of his paintings there is a very perceptible advance year by year in technical facility, but to suggest that they show also a growth of imaginative power would scarcely be correct, because there seems to have been no moment in his career when he did not possess in fullest measure the faculty of poetic invention and the capacity to put his mental images into an exquisite and persuasive shape. What he acquired as a result of his exhaustive study was a closer agreement between mind and hand, the skill to convey to others what he himself felt. But he had no need to labour to make his intelligence more keen or his fancies more varied; nature had endowed him with a temperament perfectly adapted for every demand which he could make upon it in the pursuit of his art.