Study for the Sleeping Beauty tile series

When he built his new home, The Hill, in Whitley, Surrey, artist Myles Birket Foster commissioned three sets of bedroom overmantel tiles from Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. Each set depicted a fairy tale – Cinderella, now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Beauty and the Beast, now in the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, and Sleeping Beauty, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.In 1861, Williams Morris opened his business along with two silent partners: businessman P.P. Marshall; and his friend, Charles Faulkner, neither of whom were artists. Though too poor to invest in the company, Burne-Jones was one of the designers for The Firm, as it was known, as were other artists including Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Philip Webb, Burne-Jones wife, Georgiana, Morris’s wife, Janey, and Faulkner’s sisters Kate and Lucy. Burne-Jones drew the original designs for the tiles (purchased as blanks from the Netherlands) and Lucy Faulkner used Burne-Jones’s originals as a guide to paint the tiles. Burne-Jones design and Faulkner’s painting are very similar in detail, with the exception of the two figures that emerge from the shadows at right. There may have been a need to add the two men based on the tile size in proportion to the original drawing. Typical of Burne-Jones’s early work, this image is densely detailed, with ephemeral Pre-Raphaelite women seeming to tiptoe across the surface of the paper. His mature style was more robust, though his female figures often seem overshadowed with a distinct sadness. Purchased in 1981 for the Johnson Museum Collection, for many years this drawing had an alternate title, Matilda Burning the Spindles, though there is nothing else in the artist’s oeuvre with a similar subject. (“FIGURE/STUDY: Drawings from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” text by Nancy E. Green and presented at Carlton Hobbs, LLC January 25-February 2, 2019)