The Briar Rose: study for "The Garden Court"

Edward Burne-Jones

Date: 1889

Materials: Bodycolour; in original frames

Sleeping Beauty

'The Briar Rose' was the last major series of oil paintings that Burne-Jones completed.

The subject of 'Sleeping Beauty' had been variously treated by Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and in Tennyson's poem 'The Day-Dream', and Burne-Jones had designed a set of tiles as early as 1863. 

A first set of oils was painted in 1871-73, lacking the fourth subject of 'The Garden Court' (a group of female palace servants asleep at their work), and it was only in the 1880s that he managed to finish a larger series of four paintings.

Great acclaim

Exhibited to great acclaim in 1890, they were bought by the financier AlexanderHenderson, later 1st Lord Faringdon, and were installed in the Saloon at Buscot Parkin Oxfordshire, where they remain (the house is now in the care of The National Trust).

These spectacular studies were probably also intended from the first as independentworks, and were exhibited as such at the same time as the finished oils, though in adifferent London gallery.