Sleeping Beauty by Henry Holiday (1839-1927). 1866. Oil with gilding on wood. Dimensions unknown. Collection of the Higgins Museum and Art Gallery, Bedford, reproduced here, like the images below, by kind permission of the Trustees of the gallery. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Holiday painted this scene of the Prince about to waken Sleeping Beauty on the headboard of William Burges's own Red Bed of 1865-67. The bed was initially in Burges's bedroom at 15 Buckingham Street, the Strand, before being moved in 1878 to Tower House, 29 Melbury Road in Holland Park when Burges relocated into this house that he had designed for himself. This was the bed in which Burges died.
The painting in its setting. Left: The Red Bed. Right: The whole headboard.
Holiday has treated the subject in an erotic fashion as compared to the rather chaste versions by his friend Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones had first portrayed the story of Sleeping Beauty in 1864 in a tile panel carried out as part of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.'s decoration of Myles Birket Foster's house, The Hill, Witley, in Surrey. Both the work Holiday and Burne-Jones show their affiliation with the early Aesthetic movement. Holiday's composition apparently follows closely a marginal illustration opposite the poem "The Day Dream" in Burges' own illuminated copy of Alfred Tennyson's Poems, 5th edition, published in 1848 (Crook 326).
Link to Related Material
- Painted panel at the foot of the bed, showing two of Burges's beloved pet dogs, Bogie and Midge (but probably the work of Charles Rossiter rather than Holiday)
- Other examples of Burges's designs in furniture
Bibliography
Crook, J. Mordaunt. William Burges and the High Victorian Dream. London: John Murray, 1981.
Last modified 2 April 2024 (additional image supplied by the gallery, through Simon Cooke.