Watercolour and bodycolour, 33 by 21 cm

Provenance: Christopher Wood Gallery

The image of the Briar Wood, its brambles enveloping the Sleeping Beauty and her court was an extremely popular motif in late Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic art. Best known to Victorian audiences through the brothers Grimm and Tennyson’s poem The Day Dream its strong decorative potential was soon recognised by William Morris and it was treated by Burne-Jones in a series of tile designs created for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co in 1864. Burne-Jones’s most celebrated set of paintings The Briar Rose Series (Faringdon Collection, Buscot Park) are the most famous British paintings of the subject and arguably the high point of early late Romantic art in Britain. Although Hinchliff’s watercolour does not expressly tackle the story itself, its subject, a beautiful evocation of a briar wood in full bloom, is fittingly conveyed in its full, rich, late Victorian, glory.