John Collier: The Sleeping Beauty, 1921

John Maler Collier (1850-1934) was a leading English artist, and an author. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style, and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. He was much influenced by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and also John Everett Millais. His early training was at the Slade School, working there under it's principal E.L.Poynter, and then went on to study in Munich and finally Paris, where he was taught by J.P.Laurens. He regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy and also at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, of which he became vice-president.

This remarkable picture is eloquent testimony to the survival of Pre-Raphaelite values well into the twentieth century. Dating from as late as 1921, it treats the famous fairy story of 'Sleeping Beauty' that had been told many times in European literature. Collier's interpretation is not so much an illustration of a text as an evocation of mood, an attempt to mirror a certain frame of mind on the part of the viewer. His almost exact contemporary John William Waterhouse, another artist much influenced at the outset by Alma-Tadema, pursued this course for many years, as, in a different mode, did the younger John Byam Shaw and others of his generation. But The Sleeping Beauty is in a class of its own, representing a particularly happy resolution of sentiment and form.

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HC-941: card size 7" x 5" (178mm x 127mm)