拍品专文
This beautiful study, for which the artist's daughter Margaret modelled, is for the head of the Princess, the focal point of Burne-Jones's celebrated Briar Rose series at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire. These paintings mark the climax of the attempt to illustrate the story of Sleeping Beauty which occupied the artist for the greater part of his career. Told in the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault in his Contes du Temps Passé, and later re-cast by the brothers Grimm and by Tennyson in his poem "The Day-Dream", the story first attracted Burne-Jones's attention in the early 1860s, when it was one of several fairy-tales he illustrated on sets of tiles made by the William Morris firm for 'The Hill', Myles Birket Foster's house at Witley in Surrey. By 1869 he had conceived the idea of treating the story in terms of a series of paintings, and in 1871 he began the so-called 'small' set of three canvases for his patron William Graham, completing them in 1873 (Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico). By the following year he had started a much larger set, adding a fourth subject of girls asleep at a loom which he placed third in the series and called The Garden Court. The paintings were finally completed in 1890, when they were exhibited to great acclaim at the Bond Street gallery of his dealers, Agnew's, and purchased by the financier Alexander Henderson for #15,000. Henderson installed them in the saloon at his country house, Buscot, and Burne-Jones made them into a continuous frieze by adding connecting panels.
Our study is for The Rose Bower, the final scene of the Princess asleep with three attendant maidens (see Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, London, 1973, p. 153, pl. 44). Margaret Burne-Jones was born in 1866, so if the catalogue of the Burne-Jones Exhibition of 1975-6 is correct in dating the study to 1881, it shows her at the age of fifteen. In 1885 The Rose Bower was re-started on a fresh canvas, being worked on extensively in 1886 and probably retouched up to April 1890, when all four paintings were finally completed. Margaret reappears in the finished picture, looking much as she does in the study, although she would have been twenty-four by this date.
Burne-Jones was devoted to his daughter, a renowned beauty who encapsulated his feminine ideal. In 1886, the year when The Rose Bower was so much in progress, he painted a celebrated portrait of her, as well as a more fanciful likeness entitled Flamma Vestalis (both in private collections). In 1888 she married the eminent classical scholar J. W. Mackail, who was later to write the authorised life of William Morris. She died in 1953, still intensely proud to be 'Burne-Jones's daughter' but unfortunately not living to see his reputation revive.
Our study is for The Rose Bower, the final scene of the Princess asleep with three attendant maidens (see Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, Burne-Jones, London, 1973, p. 153, pl. 44). Margaret Burne-Jones was born in 1866, so if the catalogue of the Burne-Jones Exhibition of 1975-6 is correct in dating the study to 1881, it shows her at the age of fifteen. In 1885 The Rose Bower was re-started on a fresh canvas, being worked on extensively in 1886 and probably retouched up to April 1890, when all four paintings were finally completed. Margaret reappears in the finished picture, looking much as she does in the study, although she would have been twenty-four by this date.
Burne-Jones was devoted to his daughter, a renowned beauty who encapsulated his feminine ideal. In 1886, the year when The Rose Bower was so much in progress, he painted a celebrated portrait of her, as well as a more fanciful likeness entitled Flamma Vestalis (both in private collections). In 1888 she married the eminent classical scholar J. W. Mackail, who was later to write the authorised life of William Morris. She died in 1953, still intensely proud to be 'Burne-Jones's daughter' but unfortunately not living to see his reputation revive.