The Rose Bower 

Edward Burne-Jones made this painting, entitled 'The Rose Bower', sometime in the late 19th century. It draws on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, an old story, but one that was frequently returned to by artists and writers in Victorian England. This painting has a shallow depth of field, which flattens the space and emphasizes the artist’s Pre-Raphaelite interest in surface and pattern. The women are all asleep; they are pale and languid in the manner of Burne-Jones, whose work often alluded to a sense of repressed sexuality, something that was heavily stigmatized in the period. Victorian critics saw in this work a moralising tale of feminine virtue, but perhaps we can see it as representing the psychological landscape of women in this period, caught between social expectations and inner desires. Art historians use archival sources, letters, and contemporary art criticism to try and understand how these paintings were first interpreted and what they might mean today.