PROVENANCE: Central Picture Galleries, New York, 1969; BJU, 1969.

Long began his career painting portraits in Bath, England. After an early struggle to gain entrance into the Royal Academy in London , he made trips to Italy and Spain to learn from the Old Masters. Subsequent years brought further trips to Spain to gain insight into the native culture. These travels provided the kind of inspiration, flavor, and content that sparked memorable images based on his ethnic studies. Long's immersion into Spanish genre scenes won him his first critical success in London, illustrated by the exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1858. He soon began to paint more ambitious themes from Spanish history, a subject that he exhausted without gaining entrance into the Academy. Long's success was finally secured after an extensive tour of Egypt and Syria fed the public and his own enthusiasm for Egypt 's ancient history. Such material allowed Long to explore his love for archaeological detail, religious history, and female beauty on a grand scale. He returned to England to exhibit the fruits of his inspiration, the Babylonian Marriage Market. The painting gained the artist entrance into the Royal Academy and later brought the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist. After the greatest religious painter of the 19th century, Gustave Doré, died in 1883, the Doré Gallery exhibited the paintings of the able heir to that title, Edwin Long.

Representing one of Long's supreme expressions in paint, Vashti brilliantly combines the artist's personal interests in biblical subject matter, archaeological research, and female beauty. The painting was originally exhibited at Burlington House in 1879 with (though not side-by-side) its companion piece, Queen Esther (original replica in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). Long derives the details of the sumptuous Persian palace from two sources. The biblical account relates, "And when these days were expired, the king made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the court of the garden of the king's palace; Where were white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue and white, and black, marble" (Esther 1:5-6). Long also used source material from Volume III of George Rawlinson's The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (1862-67) and (for the wall reliefs) Austen Henry Layard's studies from Nineveh.