Lord Frederic Leigh painted this victorian era painting on canvas with oil paints in 1895. It’s considered to be his best work. It alludes to the similar figures of sleeping women the Greeks often painted called Venus. The Oleander plant in the upper right corner is a toxic plant and some say may symbolize the fragile link between sleep and death.
In the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood the artists shaped their ideal image of the woman by drawing from the poetry of the era (Tennyson, Browning, etc).