Self-caricatures are common in Burne-Jones's letters and were often used as a way to jolly himself out of a dark mood; many show him in comic despair.

'Unpainted Masterpieces' reflects the feeling expressed to Charles Eliot Norton in 1880 that 'my rooms are so full of work...[and] I have begun so much that if I live to be as old as the oldest inhabitant of Fulham I shall never complete it.' By the 1890s that feeling had grown into genuine concern that 'I don't feel that I have the time before me that I used to, and it won't do to put by anything I am about for fear I shouldn't have the chance of taking it up again.'