Everyone knows how Sleeping Beauty ends. The prince cuts through the thorns, kisses the princess, and the whole enchanted court wakes. Edward Burne-Jones spent years painting that story, and he never painted the kiss. The Legend of the Briar Rose, four large canvases completed around 1890, ends with the princess still asleep, and The Rose Bower, the final scene, is the reason people have been mesmerized by the series ever since.
The four panels move from the outside in: The Briar Wood, The Council Chamber, The Garden Court, and finally The Rose Bower, the innermost room, where the briar rose holds the whole palace in suspended time.
Burne-Jones was a leading figure of the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite painting and the lifelong friend and collaborator of William Morris. He was drawn to the story for decades, making smaller versions before tackling the great canvases. When the finished series was exhibited in London in 1890, crowds lined up to see it, and it was bought by the financier Alexander Henderson, later Lord Faringdon, for his house at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire. Burne-Jones then painted additional connecting panels so the pictures would fill a room as a continuous frieze, and the series remains at Buscot Park today.
William Morris wrote verses to accompany each panel. The lines for The Rose Bower read:
Here lies the hoarded love, the key
To all the treasure that shall be;
Come fated hand the gift to take,
And smite this sleeping world awake.
The whole series feels like a painted dream, a world where time has stopped and nothing can hurt the sleepers. It is an image of protection as much as of romance, and it has almost nothing to say about what happens after the princess wakes.
That refusal is the painting's quiet power. Most stories rush to the happy ending. This one lingers in the enchanted pause, where every possibility is still waiting. This poster is printed from a black-and-white print of the work, which suits it: the briars become the threads of a spell that hasn't yet been broken.
Burne-Jones's The Rose Bower appears on our: