Richard 'Dickie' Doyle was a watercolour artist and illustrator best known for his work for Punch and for his interest in fairy pictures. His early enthusiasm for fairy tales anticipated growing public interest which resulted in new fairytales being written in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The present drawing relates to An Old Fairy Tale Told Anew, a version of Sleeping Beauty by J. R. Planché, which took several years to come to fruition, and was finally published in 1865 with woodcuts after Doyle's drawings made by the Dalziel brothers. The model for the heroine was Blanche Stanley, whom Doyle had met and fallen in love with in 1850. Despite her marriage to Lord Airlie soon afterwards he remained devoted to her. She appears repeatedly in his drawings, and he never married.