Study of Sleeping Beauty from 'The Legend of Briar Rose: The Rose Bower'

The Legend of Briar Rose was a theme that had occupied Burne-Jones since the mid-1860s when he prepared a series of tiles of the subject for Morris & Co. He first began painting the subject at the request of William Graham, M.P. and Glasgow businessman, in 1869. However, the largest and best-known cycle of The Legend of Briar Rose was begun in 1885, and the four completed canvases were sold to Lord Faringdon by Agnew's in 1890, to hang in his house, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. After viewing the room in which the pictures were to hang, Burne-Jones then painted ten connecting panels in order that the whole wall surface be covered.
The charming sketch sold here is a study for the figure of Sleeping Beauty in the fourth canvas in the series, The Rose Bower. The inscription on the frame of the completed oil reads:
Here lies the hoarded love, the key
To all the treasure that shall be.
Come, fated hand, the gift to take
And smite the sleeping world awake.