The composition of The Briar Wood is similar to that of the central panel in the Sleeping Beauty tiles of 1864 (cat. no. 25), although Burne-Jones has lessened the effect of symmetry by moving two of the sleeping knights to the center and adding two huddled figures on the right. The prince holds his sword in exactly the same way as does Childe Roland (cat. no. 14), and is dressed in very similar armour. A complete revision of the figure, now more akin to Saint George (cat. no. 85), is one of the main alterations in the 1884 oil, in which the pose of the secondary knights has again been refined and the background of briars and shields completely changed. William Morris provided verses to be lettered beneath the framework surrounding each of the four paintings installed in the saloon at Buscot Park, with this one for The Briar Wood: The fateful slumber floats and flows About the tangle of the rose; But lo! The fated hand and heart To rend the slumbrous curse apart! The verses were later published in Poems by the Way (1891), together with "Another for The Briar Rose," which addresses the pictures' metaphorical reading as an image of "the tan- gle of world s wrong and right." While there is no evidence that the artist wished to invest the scenes with such moral symbolism, contemporary commentators did see in them a religious, even political, significance. Having mused on "the whole [scene's having] transported me to a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone," the critic Robert de la Sizeranne saw in The Briar Wood the moral that "the most righteous cause, the truest ideas, the most necessary reforms, cannot rise triumphant, however bravely we may fight for them, before the time fixed by the mysterious decree of the Higher Powers. . . . The strongest and the wisest fail. They exhaust themselves with battling against the ignorance and meanness of their genera- tion, which hem in and hamper them like the branches of the briar rose; and at last they fall asleep in the thorny thicket, like the five knights, who were as valiant as their successor, but who came before their time." 1 1. Robert de la Sizeranne, "In Memoriam, Sir Edward Burne-Jones: A Tribute from France," Magazine of Art, 1898, p. 516, quoted in Powell 1986, p. 17.
Not signed. Fitzwilliam work list: 1872 4 pictures of sleeping Beauty - painted in oil for Graham began in 1871... Burne-Jones is here mistaken as there were only ever three paintings made for Graham The similarity between Childe Rolande (1861) and the knight entering the briar thicket there, is not merely visual. Browning's poem describes a knight remembering the failure of his peers to complete their quest, a theme which Burne-Jones developed in the Briar Rose series. In this version the similarity is more evident than in the final version. Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it toll’d Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of all the lost adventurers my peers,— 195 How such a one was strong, and such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knell’d the woe of years. There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met To view the last of me, a living frame 200 For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.”