These two beautiful pencil studies are characteristic of Burne-Jones' drawings from this period. J. Comyns Carr has discussed the importance of Burne-Jones' studies: "It is this which gives to the drawings of Burne-Jones their extraordinary charm and fascination. He who possesses one of these pencil studies has something more that a leaf torn from an artist's sketchbook. He has in the slightest of them a fragment that images the man: that is compact of all the qualities of his art; and that reveals his ideal as surely as it interprets the facts upon which he was immediately engaged. And yet we see in them how strenuously, how resolutely, he set himself to wring from nature the vindication of his own design" 61-62). A.L. Baldry has similarly commented on Burne-Jones' drawings: "These drawings show well with what power of design and with what sensitiveness of hand he puts down his conceptions; how sincerely and unaffectedly he studies so that nothing may be lacking in the constructing and fitting together of his compositions; how systematically he applies his power of selection to the collecting of what is necessary for his scheme of expression. Nothing is careless or merely tentative. There is a purpose in every touch, a motive for every experiment: and there is always clearly visible the intention to uphold that lofty ideal of pictorial art which has influenced him all through his busy life. Without such an ideal it would have been hardly possible for him to have faced and grappled with the accumulation of close study which his method has made inevitable." (344).

Two comparable pencil drawings for the early watercolour version of The Garden Court, both dated 1870, are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.4,5 Three additional similar pencil drawings, c. 1873, are at the Tate Gallery, London, as is a pencil study of a sleeping woman's head.6 A study of two female figures, c. 1870, in chalk and watercolour on green tinted paper is at the York City Art Gallery.7 A gouache of the same two sleeping attendants sold at Sotheby's, London in 1981.8 A later drawing of the right-hand figure is in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand.9 A drapery study for the figure, third from the left in the later version of The Garden Court, is in the Cecil French Bequest to the Fulham Public Libraries.10

Related Material

• The Briarose series
• Another sketch of a sleeping girl for the Briar Rose series

Bibliography

Lanigan, Dennis and Douglas Schoenherr 2000, pp. 69-71, p.69 (illus.).

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Last modified 1 June 2021