The Garden Court by Edward Burne-Jones

Edward Burne-Jones' large oil painting, The Garden Court, was completed in 1894. Today, it is one of the most popular paintings in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery's collection. It perfectly represents what you could call the pre-Raphaelite dream of a medieval past. Throughout his life, Burne-Jones was captivated by the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, or Little Beauty. The imagined medieval world is cursed to sleep for a hundred years by an evil fairy, until she will be awakened by a handsome prince. When the curse takes effect, every living person and animal in her palace falls asleep as well, and the castle is covered over and over by impenetrable thorny roses. This dreamlike scene in front of us relates to the part of the story when the prince is about to discover the enchanted castle where sleep reigns supreme. We see six young women who have fallen asleep while weaving and fetching water when the enchantment began. Now their stylized bodies form a decoratively flowing frieze across the picture's narrow foreground before a thicket of sweet briar roses. We start reading the painting with our eyes from the far left by a sundial on a slender stand, where a girl in a plain dark blue and green dress sits on the side of a stone fountain, lowering her profile on her arm. Next to her and facing us is a girl who has rested her head on a small vessel. At her feet, slightly further to the right on the polished stone floor, sits a girl in a pale red dress with a blue sash around her waist and a grey turban. She turns her back to us, legs tucked under and leaning her shoulder against the wooden frame of a loom that rises up to the upper edge of the composition. Beyond this central vertical axis, three more girls can be seen in further poses of enchanted sleep. One in a dark green dress sits almost upright against the loom's beam. Her right hand has dropped down and released a sphere which has rolled along the shiny floor. Another girl, in dark grey, rests her head against her knee. More small marble spheres lie in her lap. To the right, the girl in dark lilac who was working the loom has sunk onto the cloth over the front beam. Her hand is resting on the beater. Turned back, facing towards the first figure, she brings the sweep of her moving gaze to a close. All of the young women's faces appear similar and idealised. They're all based on the features of Bonjones's daughter, Margaret. Behind the frieze of figures is a thicket of roses, dark green with tiny white flowers. The thorny branches have shut the wider garden cord off from view and twisted around the loom and the sundial, but the girls are safe. The spell has closed off the young women from the world around them. Yet it seems that the sleepers, rather than simply awaiting rescue by a man, have escaped into a dream of their own, away from the toils of life and society. What are they dreaming about? Many of the artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, including Bonjones, had complicated personal relationships with women, while their paintings often portrayed Victorian attitudes to women in general. Medieval subject matter and fairy tales served as a vehicle to interpret gender relationships, while in the real world women were increasingly politically active, educated and seeking financial independence. In fact, the Pre-Raphaelites had female patrons and female colleagues such as Evelyn de Morgan and Elizabeth Siddle. Maybe this image is inviting us to imagine what the girls would want for themselves. But maybe this image is not restricted to gender. Maybe it is a metaphor of an alternative world that offers an escape from the challenges of contemporary life to everyone. British society was rapidly changing during the age of empire and industrialisation. Pictures of perfect kings, saints and fairy tales provided a place to lose oneself at least for a while. So this painting is not about historical or literary accuracy. A complete series of images which Bonjones associated with the story today hangs at Buscat Park in Berkshire. It also includes pictures of the sleeping king, the princess and knights, all taken out of this into a dream world, all yet undisturbed as the princess has not been awakened from the spell.