[STUDY RELATING TO THE COUNCIL CHAMBER IN THE BRIAR ROSE SERIES]
signed with initials and dated l.l.: EBJ 1887
pencil and white chalk, arched top
15 ¼ by 11 in.
These various studies of girls’ faces were made in preparation for the painting entitled The Council Chamber, which is part of the series of paintings (existing in several versions) which tell the story of Sleeping Beauty and which Tennyson, in his poem based on the legend called ‘The Day-Dream’, had given the name 'The Briar Rose'. The positioning of the heads corresponds most closely to the version of The Council Chamber upon which Burne-Jones worked intermittently from 1872 to 1892 and which is now in the Bancroft collection in the Delaware Art Museum (see fig.00). This painting was itself a revision on larger scale of the second part of three panels in what is called ‘The Little Briar Rose Series’, done for William Graham and completed in 1871. These are now in the Museo de Arte at Ponce, Puerto Rico. In his first revision of the scheme, Burne-Jones’s intention seems to have been to make a new series of four compositions, but only The Council Chamber was completed. However, in 1884, he decided to start on an entirely new Briar Rose series, again in four parts, based on the earlier compositions but with many revisions. A series of entries in Burne-Jones’s work record from the mid and late 1880s chronicle this project, and one particularly in 1887, where he records that he ‘redrew all the figures of the sleeping girls in the third picture of the sleeping palace’ (quoted Stephen Wildman, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum, exhibition catalogue, Art Services International, 2004, p.120), refers to the process of revision of which the present drawing was part.
The final Briar Rose series was completed in 1890. Great excitement attached to its display at Agnew’s in Old Bond Street that same year, and the paintings were then exhibited in Whitechapel where they were seen by large numbers of people. The Briar Rose was installed at Buscot Park, the house of Lord Faringdon (now National Trust), in frames designed by the artist.
The study on the upper part of the sheet, showing a girl’s head in profile and with braided hair, looking downwards, appears to relate the head of the sleeping girl which is at the centre of the composition of The Council Chamber. In the finished painting, her head is covered with a cowl and is slightly turned towards the spectator rather than shown in pure profile. The study of a face on the lower part of the sheet, and the subsidiary study at the right centre, relate to the head of the sleeping figure in the upper left part of the finished composition, where a woman is seen with her face supported on her hand.
CSN
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