The Briar Rose The story of Sleeping Beauty appears in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm, and was used by Tennyson in his poem "The Day-Dream," published in 1842. Burne-Jones had first treated the subject in a tile panel of 1864 (cat. no. 25), part of the scheme of decoration for the house of the painter Myles Birket Foster. He returned to the theme in 1869-71, beginning a set of oil paintings for William Graham, now known as the "small" Briar Rose series. Three canvases, all now at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, were completed in 1873: The Briar Wood (cat. no. 55), showing the prince discov- ering the sleeping knights; The Council Chamber, with the king and his courtiers asleep; and The Rose Bower (cat. no. 58), in which Sleeping Beauty awaits the princes reviving kiss. An additional subject of female attendants asleep at a loom, The Garden Court, is not known to have been undertaken, although a half-size watercolour sketch may be of this date. 1 As in the case of Pygmalion and the Image (cat. nos. 87a-d) the artist almost immediately began a larger set of four oils, but work was laid aside in favor of other commitments, and he recorded finishing "the 1st of the Briar Rose" only in 1884. 2 Agnew's had agreed to pay him £15,000 for the paintings, and it seems that they were already with the firm by 1885, awaiting completion, when he decided on a radical rework- ing of the other three subjects, apparently beginning new canvases. Work is recorded on "the Sleeping Princess" in 1886, and in 1887 he "re-drew all the figures of the sleeping girls in the 3rd picture of the sleeping palace," presumably a reference to The Garden Court, although a group of six large bold studies in bodycolour dated 1889 (cat. no. 57) shows that he was still concerned with these. After further work through- out 1889, he "finished them — all four" in April 1890, scrupu- lously dating them 1870-90 to indicate their long gestation. They were exhibited in the summer at Agnews, "to ever- increasing crowds of delighted visitors," 3 and subsequently at Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, "where many thousand people came to see them without entrance fee." 4 Bought by the financier Alexander Henderson, later 1st Lord Faringdon, the oils were installed in the saloon at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire (only two miles from Kelmscott Manor), where they remain; Burne-Jones painted ten additional strips of canvas (without figures) to fit into the paneling between them. What must be the three canvases abandoned in 1885 were taken up again and completed between 1892 and 1894: The Council Chamber (cat. no. 56), The Garden Court (1894; Bristol Museums and Art Gallery), and The Rose Bower (1894; Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin). 5 1. Christie's, June n, 1993, lot 93, 2. According to Burne-Jones's retrospective 11 List of my designs drawings and pictures [etc.]," now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (transcript at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery). 3. Bell 1892, p. 63. 4. Memorials, vol. 2, p. 205. 5. Although on the same scale as the larger sets of canvases, a version of The Briar Wood, sold at Christie 's, November 27, 1987, lot 143 (42 x 72 l A in.), may be of even earlier date than the Graham oils, as indicated by the inscription on the stretcher: "The Knights in 'The Briar Rose' early design painted in 1869."