John Keats's 1819 ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci provided inspiration for several Pre-Raphaelite artists, including John William Waterhouse, Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane and Frank Dicksee. Its subject is a fairy who seduces a knight with her eyes and singing voice, before lulling him to sleep and abandoning him on an empty hillside. The present watercolour depicts the moment when the fading knight dreams of the fairy he saw across the meadow, and his own initial approach to her on horseback. Meynell Rheam also made a much larger upright watercolour of the subject in 1901 (sold Sotheby's, New York, 12 October 1994, lot 351), in which the fairy stands over the dying knight in a misty clearing.
Although Rheam was part of the artistic community based in Newlyn, Cornwall, his style and subject matter were never characteristic of his peers. He tended to follow the principles of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the present painting is a typical example of this.