The Prince entering the Briar Wood

The picture represents the first scene in the Briar Rose series, a project that occupied Burne-Jones for some thirty years, underwent tortuously complex developments, and ultimately resulted in one of his greatest triumphs. Some account of this process must be given in order to assess the painting's significance.

The Briar Rose series was based on the story of 'Sleeping Beauty', told in the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault in his Contes du Temps Passé and twice re-cast for nineteenth-century readers, first by the brothers Grimm in their Kinder - und Hausmärchen, then by Tennyson in 'The Day Dream'. 'Sleeping Beauty' was one of a number of fairytales that Burne-Jones illustrated in the early 1860s. 'Cinderella' and 'Bluebeard' both inspired watercolours, while 'Cinderella', 'Sleeping Beauty' and 'Beauty and the Beast' were treated in strip-cartoon fashion for the sets of tiles he was designing for the Morris firm. Some of these sets were commissioned by Myles Birket Foster as overmantels for his new house, 'The Hill' at Witley in Surrey, the decoration of which was being overseen by Morris. Birket Foster's 'Sleeping Beauty' tiles, designed by Burne-Jones in January 1864, are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other sets are known (fig. 2).

These early designs for tiles are in a consciously quaint and artless style which reflects Burne-Jones's current interest in German illustration and engraving. He was a great admirer of the contemporary German master Ludwig Richter, himself an illustrator of Grimm, and his work at this period is dotted with references to Dürer, Holbein, and other early men. One of the Sleeping Beauty designs is based on Hans Baldung's well-known woodcut The Sleeping Groom. Burne-Jones's studies in this field reflect his involvement in the movement which took place in England in the 1860s to raise standards in book and magazine illustration. He was not alone in this; other contributors, such as Frederick Sandys and John Tenniel, were similarly influenced. But Burne-Jones had another reason for not only looking at German artists but illustrating the fairy tales which, thanks to the Grimms and others, were intimately associated with German culture. Like so much else in his early career, Burne-Jones's interest in these stories owed much to Ruskin, who was determined to shape his development in accordance with his own artistic and social ideals. For obvious reasons, Ruskin attached great importance to the ethics of fairytales and the principles governing children's book illustration. He deplored the fact that in 1862 Perrault's Contes had been re-printed in Paris with illustrations by Gustave Doré, an artist he passionately disliked and regarded as the embodiment of all the most socially pernicious tendencies in modern art. On the other hand, he revered Dürer and adored the innocent, childlike world evoked by Richter, not least in his illustrations to Grimm. There is little doubt that Ruskin was encouraging Burne-Jones to see that these stories found sympathetic treatment in England.

By 1871 Burne-Jones was re-shaping the Sleeping Beauty theme in a radically different form, focussing on salient images rather than attempting to tell the story as a running narrative, full of circumstantial detail. That year he painted for the dealer Murray Marks a small picture of the Sleeping Beauty herself (Manchester City Art Gallery), treating it in a flat decorative style which suggests it was destined for some Aesthetic interior that Marks was master-minding. At the same time he began a project which is entered in his autograph work-record (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) under 1872: '4 pictures of Sleeping Beauty - painted in oil for Graham. Begun in 1871'. This refers to a set of three paintings, each measuring 23½ x 45/52 in., and collectively often known as the 'small Briar Rose series' (Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico). Completed in 1873 for William Graham, the wealthy India merchant and Liberal member of parliament for Glasgow who was Burne-Jones's greatest patron, they reduce the story to its basic elements, showing the prince entering the Briar Wood (fig. 3), the King and his courtiers asleep, and the princess, surrounded by her maidens, awaiting the kiss that will bring the sleeping palace to life.

Burne-Jones had not only simplified the story, he had altered its mood and artistic orientation. He paid his last two visits to Italy in 1871 and 1873, and his work was never more Italianate than at this time. More specifically, it was never more Florentine and Michelangelesque, a direct reflection of his itinerary on these journeys. The outstanding examples in the small Briar Rose paintings is the group of sleeping knights, who twist and writhe in violent contraposto in a way they had not done in the corresponding tile design (fig. 2). A small, unfinished canvas in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (fig. 4) dates from this period and must be an experimental work, showing these figures in process of evolution.

But the Briar Rose was never as Florentine as some of Burne-Jones's conceptions; another, counterwaiting influence was at work. In the early 1860s, like so many members of his circle, Burne-Jones had gone through a Venetian phase. This too had been related to two visits to Italy (1859 and 1862), both of them organised by Ruskin as part of the moulding process already mentioned. Each tour focused on Venice, and the result was a series of pictures - Green Summer, Le Chant d'Amour and others - in an intensely romantic and richly coloured idiom reminiscent of Giorgione.

No-one loved these works more than William Graham. He owned numerous examples, and his fondness for them did much to ensure that an idyllic, Venetian element persisted in Burne-Jones's work long after he had outgrown the original impulse. The Briar Rose series is a key example. By suppressing incidental detail and concentrating on such features as sleeping maidens, a knight errant, a woodland setting and a mood of enchantment, Burne-Jones purged the work of Germanic quaintness and re-cast it in accordance with Giorgionesque conventions.

There remains the question of why Burne-Jones refers to '4 pictures' in his work record, but only three canvases exist. It has been suggested in the past that '4' is a slip of the pen, but this seems unlikely in view of the fact that we possess a handsome composition drawing for a fourth subject, datable on stylistic grounds to the early 1870s. Showing a group of servant girls who have fallen asleep as they work at a loom or draw water from a well, the drawing was sold in these Rooms on 11 June 1993 (lot 93). This does not, however, solve the problem of the fourth painting. Was it started but abandoned, or completed and, in some unknown manner, destroyed? The former seems more likely; certainly only three pictures are mentioned in the early records.

Hardly was the small series finished than Burne-Jones embarked on a much larger set, each canvas measuring 49/49½ x 90/104 in. (In both series, the height is more or less constant while the length varies considerably.) This time he certainly included the fourth subject, inserting it between the second and last scenes in the sequence. Given the size of the canvases, it seems likely that he already envisaged them on the four sides of a room. The paintings are mentioned in the work-record for 1874-5, but then do not appear until June 1884, when he 'took up again...the subject of the Briar Rose' and offered the four pictures to Graham. Graham was such an ardent admirer of Burne-Jones's work that he owned several of his compositions in small and large versions. However, his room for new requisitions was limited. At his London house in Grosvenor Place modern and old master pictures not only took up every inch of wallspace but sat about on chairs and tables or stood in ranks on the floor. Burne-Jones's four large canvases would have been impossible to accomodate, so Graham undertook to negotiate their sale to Agnew's. This was a particularly generous gesture since Graham was already a dying man; indeed the arrangements were completed at his bedside shortly before his death in July 1885, Agnew's agreeing to pay £15,000 for the four canvases (some £600,000 in today's currency). It was by far the largest sum Burne-Jones had ever received, and, as Graham had hoped, finally ensured his long-term financial security.

By the autumn of 1884 Burne-Jones was working on 'the 1st picture of the Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose', that is to say the scene of the prince entering the briar wood. His friend Lady Leighton Warren sent him briars from her country estate, cut, as he had requested, from some 'hoary, aged monarch of the tangle, thick as a wrist and with long, horrible spikes.' Sir Coutts Lindsay, the owner of the Grosvenor Gallery, allowed him to make studies of armour in his collection. Other pieces he designed himself with the help of the young architect and metalworker W.A.S. Benson, 'expressly in order to lift them out of association with any historical time.' An old photograph (fig. 5) shows the canvas at an early stage of development, in fact probably as it looked when it was laid aside for a decade in the mid-1870s. At this point it was clearly little more than a blown-up version of the design established in the small series. More shields have been introduced in the background and the briars make more extravagent arabesques, but the figures have been copied almost exactly. Two helmets in the foreground also re-appear.

During the following winter and spring the picture underwent radical changes before it was finally declared 'finished' in 1885 (fig. 6). The prince was made taller, his head and feet both cutting the edge of the canvas. He also assumed a more elegant pose. Far from battling his way into the picture, struggling with recalcitrant briars, as he had formerly, he seems to float, mesmerised, on some wave of destiny. The sleeping knights have changed no less dramatically. The body of the one stretched out second from the right has been given an extra twist so that his head looks down, not up; and a new figure has been introduced in the right foreground, displacing the helmet previously in this position but now almost touching the head of the knight who owns it. Armour and accoutrements have also been greatly elaborated, while important changes have occurred in the disposition and design of the briars and shields. Perhaps the most startling development is one we are hardly in a position to gauge fully. If the sketch at Liverpool (fig. 4) is anything to go by, the picture's colour scheme was originally to be dominated by the greens and pinks of the briar rose. By the time it was finished, it had acquired the sombre tawny hues that Burne-Jones had explored in King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Tate Gallery), the masterpiece he had shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1884. In the autumn of 1999 the picture and its companions were exhibited briefly at Agnew's as a tribute to Sir Brinsley Ford, who had recently died. It was fascinating to note how the canvas had been re-worked obsessively, forms still visible in the underpainting being cancelled and corrected until the perfect solution was reached. In the process, the surface, clotted with dry, crumbling paint and superimposed glazes, had acquired an astonishing density and richness.
Equally striking was the stylistic variation between this picture and the other three, a variation which confirms all we know of the scheme's development. At some point in the middle of 1885, Burne-Jones made the radical decision to begin the remaining three pictures on new canvases. We shall probably never know what precipitated this crisis. Perhaps the first picture had been taken to such a point that he felt dissatisfied with the other designs, which he was certainly to modify and elaborate; but it is hard to see why he could not have done this on the original canvases, as he had with the scene of the prince entering the wood. Lady Burne-Jones makes no reference to the matter in her Memorials of her husband's life (1904), and the relevant entries in the artist's own work-record are, perhaps understandably, so cryptic that it would be easy to overlook their significance and fail to grasp what was happening. In the autumn of 1885 he 'began another of the Briar Rose pictures - the fourth with the Princess asleep', continuing to work on it in 1886. In 1887 he 'redrew all the figures of the sleeping girls in the third picture of the sleeping palace', and in 1888 he 'redrew and designed the sleeping King, the second of the Briar Rose pictures.' Whatever caused all this drastic revising, it must have required considerable courage, with Agnew's eagerly awaiting the pictures' completion. But then, despite his otherworldliness, Burne-Jones had always displayed a remarkable toughness of character.

Burne-Jones continued to work on the paintings throughout 1889. For the head of the sleeping princess, the focal point of the whole elaborate scheme, he used his twenty-three year old daughter, Margaret, as a model, a choice that has inevitably led to psychological speculation. At last, on 10 April 1890, all four pictures were finished, and he dated the first of them 1870-90 to indicate the length of time the designs had been in gestation. The intensity of his labours had left him exhausted. 'Such a winter I have had...', he told his patron F.R. Leyland, 'Of course I'm done up as usual - quite at an end of myself for a bit.'

But the rewards were soon forthcoming. Entitled The Briar Wood, The Council Chamber, The Garden Court and The Rose Bower, the pictures were exhibited that summer at Agnew's gallery in Old Bond Street, drawing enormous crowds and winning almost universal acclaim from fellow artists and critics. It was the climax of Burne-Jones's career, crowning the formidable reputation he had long established at the Grosvenor and New Galleries before the inevitable reaction set in and he began to suffer the long eclipse from which he has only emerged in recent times. In some ways the dream-like subject expressed his vision more completely than anything he had achieved before. Certainly it was particularly appealing, and Burne-Jones had exploited its possibilities to the full. The last two scenes were replete with his most winning girls, while all three of the paintings recommenced in the later 1880s revealed an unusually bright palette, with the pink of the briar rose itself providing the keynote.

'Thousands of the most cultivated people in London,' Burne-Jones's Times obiturist would recall with a certain unction, 'hastened to see, and passionately to admire, the painter's masterpiece.' In fact, great pains were taken to ensure that the paintings were not only seen by 'cultivated people' in the metropolis. After appearing at Agnew's, they were exhibited at Liverpool; and the following year they were shown at Whitechapel, where the enterprising warden of Toynbee Hall, Canon Samuel Barnett, with the active co-operation of Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, G.F. Watts and other public-spirited artists, organised exhibitions of pictures as a source of enlightenment in the poverty-stricken East End. There were even plans to tour the pictures in America, but these did not materialise. Meanwhile, they had been bought by the financier Alexander Henderson, later first Baron Faringdon, who already owned The Days of Creation (Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard) and other works by Burne-Jones. He had recently acquired Buscot Park, an eighteenth century mansion near Lechlade, as a country estate, and when their travels were over the pictures were installed there in the saloon, one to a wall as Burne-Jones had probably envisaged some twenty years earlier. Burne-Jones made them into a continuous frieze by painting small connecting panels and designing a giltwood framework in the Renaissance style, while verses specially written by William Morris were inscribed beneath each of the main subjects. The ensemble remains in situ to this day (fig. 7).

During the last years of his life Burne-Jones was at pains to complete and make marketable the numerous unfinished works that littered his studio. These included the discarded Briar Rose canvases, which were again sold through Agnew's, who by now had become his regular dealers. The Council Chamber (Delaware Art Museum, Wilamington) was completed in 1892 and sold to the American collector Samuel Bancroft. Burne-Jones was dismayed that the group had been split up, and Bancroft wrote to Charles Fairfax Murray, his agent in London and a former assistant to Burne-Jones, offering to buy the other paintings or surrender his in exchange for something else by the artist. Murray replied that 'the other two belong to Agnew, so nothing can be done except through them,' and that in any case 'there is no telling when they will be finished.' In fact The Garden Court (Bristol Art Gallery) was completed in 1893 and The Rose Bower (Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin) in 1894 or 1895. Both works found purchasers in England. The Garden Court was bought by Lord Wharncliffe, who already owned King Cophetua and had been an important patron of Burne-Jones's brother-in-law Edward Poynter (see lot 14). The Rose Bower entered the spectacular collection formed by the Scottish mining millionaire George McCulloch and displayed at his house in Queen's Gate, Kensington. It was one of three late Burne-Joneses that McCulloch acquired about this time. The others were the second, oil version of Love among the Ruins (New Gallery 1894; Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton) and The Wedding of Psyche (New Gallery 1895; Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels).

Where does the present picture fit into this long and tangled story? It has sometimes been assumed that the third, 'discarded' set of paintings included all four subjects, one of which was lost; and if this was the case, it would be tempting to see our picture as the missing canvas. All the evidence, however, points to the fact that the discarded versions never included the scene of the prince entering the wood. We not only have Burne-Jones's assurance that he 'finished' this subject in 1885 and Fairfax Murray's reference to 'two' other pictures (out of three) in his letter to Bancroft. There is also the evidence of the pictures as Buscot, confirming the work-record by the break in style between the first picture and the others. In any case the size of our picture is against its being one of the 'discarded' works. It measures only 42 inches in height, seven inches shorter than the pictures at Buscot and their counterparts at Wilmington, Bristol and Dublin.

Gerald Agnew made this point in a letter to Mrs Henry Rockwell, Samuel Bancroft's niece, dated 14 December 1937. After Bancroft's death in 1915, Mrs Rockwell acted as curator of his collection, and she had evidently written to Agnew about the version of The Council Chamber that her uncle had bought in 1892. In replying, Agnew confessed to some understandable confusion about the absence of the 'prince' subject from the set his firm had dispersed in the 1890s. He had no doubt, however, that the present picture, which Agnew's had bought at the first Burne-Jones studio sale, was not the missing work, pointing out that it was 'considerably smaller than the other three.'

Then there is the old label on the picture stretcher stating that the picture is an 'early design painted in 1869.' Dates on Burne-Jones's paintings and drawings should often be treated with caution, but there seems no reason to doubt this label, which, since the date was repeated in the catalogue of the first studio sale, held at Christie's, with almost indecent haste, within a month of his death in June 1898, must have been in place by then, if not earlier. In fact, far from contradicting the date, all the evidence supports it. It implies, of course, that the picture was painted two years before the small series in Puerto Rico was started, but this dating is confirmed by the fact that the figures correspond closely to the tile design of 1864 (fig. 2). The sleeping knights have not yet acquired the Michelangelesque contortions that we find in the Puerto Rico canvas (fig. 3). The only slight concession to this development is the pose of the knight on the far right, whose head lolls sideways rather than being seen in left profile, as it is in the early tile (fig. 2). This was too repetitive, given that the knight to his left, with head falling back, was also in profile. More variation was called for, and it was precisely this variation that would be so dramatically developed in the 'small' version of 1871-3 (fig. 3).

A study for the prince which was sold in these Rooms on 25 March 1994, party of lot 336 (fig. 8), has some significance in this context. Drawn from the nude in black chalk, it can be dated on stylistic grounds to the late 1860s, and is almost certainly connected with our picture.

Finally, there is the picture's colour scheme. It has the same green-and-pink tonality that occurs in the small experimental painting at Liverpool (fig. 4), which at the most can only date from a year or two later. Much of this colouring is achieved by means of glazes over a monochrome underpainting, a feature also of the Liverpool sketch and the Puerto Rico series. In fact, if our picture was a different size we might be tempted to see it as a discarded work from this set. But just as it is too small to be associated with the large series, it is much too large to have been rejected from the small one.

The inference of these conclusions is clear. We tend to see Burne-Jones painting the subject on a small scale in the early 1870s, then, with the confidence this exercise had given him, embarking on the much larger series brought to such triumphant fruition in 1890. While this concept remains substantially true, we now know that as early as 1869 he was treating one of the subjects on a major scale, presumably intending to make it the first of a series. Perhaps he realised that the scale he had chosen was too ambitious. He was still only thirty-six in 1869, and keenly aware that he needed to make up for his lack of early training and improve his drawing. His mentor G.F. Watts was making this point very forcibly, and critics were constantly complaining of his weak draughtsmanship when they reviewed his exhibited pictures. Nor should we forget the emotional turmoil that Burne-Jones went through in 1869. This year saw the climax of his affair with the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco, a devastating experience that left him mentally and physically prostrated and often interrupted his work. This was followed in 1871 by something equally, in its way, overwhelming, his third visit to Italy. As we have seen, this seems to have made him dissatisfied with the sleeping knights and determined to give them a more Michelangelesque form.

Whatever the reasons for his decision, Burne-Jones abandoned the canvas, worked out his ideas on a smaller scale, and then, this achievement behind him, planned to repeat it on a scale even larger than that adopted in 1869. The discarded canvas remained in his studio for nearly thirty years, a monument to early ambitions and never, as so often happened with paintings of this kind, re-worked in the light of later stylistic values to produce a saleable commodity. The result is not only a fascinating document, representing a crucial stage in the evolution of one of his most important works, but a picture of considerable charm. The figures are clearly unfinished, but the briar-rose background has been elaborately worked, creating a highly decorative and richly textured, tapestry-like effect.

Unfinished works by Burne-Jones tend to raise the spectre of 'studio' participation. In a sense, this is immaterial. Burne-Jones deliberately organised his studio on Renaissance lines. If the design of a picture was his, it was essentially 'his' picture, however many hands were involved, and it would be a bold man who claimed that even the greatest of his works had no 'studio' intervention at some stage. Nonetheless, the subject should be addressed.

It is true that Burne-Jones began to employ assistants in the later 1860s. Charles Fairfax Murray, his first adjutant, arrived in November 1866 at the tender age of seventeen; T.M. Rooke, who stayed with him on and off until the end of Burne-Jones's life, followed in 1869. Murray, a brilliant and precocious executant, is more likely to have been involved in the present instance, but the picture is not among those he lists as having worked on during his time in Burne-Jones's studio. (A transcript of his notes, made by J.R. Holliday, is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.) Nor does it tally with the sort of work for Burne-Jones with which he is usually associated. Much of this was connected with Burne-Jones's commissions from the Morris firm. Even the St George series (various collections), which we know Murray worked on extensively, falls into this category since it was basically decoration for Birket Foster's house, 'The Hill', for which, as we have seen, the Sleeping Beauty tiles were designed. Other work was straightforward copying, like the version Murray made of St Theophilus and the Angel, a watercolour of 1867. None of this suggests that he would have been entrusted with our canvas, a highly experimental work in which a tile design was to be transformed into a large easel picture.

In his recent biography of his grandfather, Charles Fairfax Murray: The Unknown Pre-Raphaelite, David Elliott quotes comments by Murray on 'the years I spent with Mr Jones'. Murray observed, for instance, that 'my work for him principally consisted in commencing pictures from sketches and studies.' Equally, he complained to his friend W.S. Spanton that 'Mr Jones cannot be satisfied with any work but his own and has always destroyed anything I have done for him, however carefully, so that it is no pleasure to do it. He insists that it is useful to have it so prepared for him, but there is no pleasure in ... spending days over it (only to have it) destroyed ruthlessly in a few minutes.' This strongly suggests that even if the first outlines of our picture had been laid in by Murray, any preliminary work has been obliterated by Burne-Jones. We should also bear in mind that Murray had left Burne-Jones's regular employment by September 1869, probably the reason why Rooke arrived that year. From then on Murray was free-lancing, making copies for Rossetti and working directly for Morris on his illuminated manuscripts and stained glass.

As already noted, the picture was bought by Agnew's at the first of Burne-Jones's two studio sales, held at Christie's in July 1898. No doubt it aroused their interest because they had already handled the later Briar Rose paintings, and it was they who probably gave it its present frame. This is typical of the handsome Renaissance-style frames that Agnew so often used for Burne-Jones's more substantial works, and is comparable to the elaborate framework that encases the paintings at Buscot. From Agnew's the picture seems to have been bought by a collector called T.H. Ward, and it later belonged to the first Viscount St David's, who sold it anonymously at Christie's in July 1926. The catalogue entry is a wonderful illustration of how little interest there was in Burne-Jones at this date. 'The Knights and the Briar Rose', we read, 'A Knight in armour, holding a shield, with three companions asleep among the briar roses.' No attempt to identify the subject, let alone relate the picture to the other versions. Nor did the price paid for the picture, a mere £58, belie the impression of an artist in full eclipse. Seven years later the centenary of Burne-Jones's birth would occur, and there were plans to hold a centenary exhibition at the Tate. No wonder those who had known and admired him - his surviving family, W. Graham Robertson, William Graham's daughter Lady Horner, and others - viewed the prospect with dismay. We are very grateful to David Elliot for his help in preparing this entry