The work of the greatest poet of the English Middle Ages Jeffrey Chaucer made an indelible impression on EK Bern-Jones and W. Morris in his youth. Later it became for these artists an inexhaustible source of finding a high romantic inspiration and literary subjects, prompting them to create a number of significant works performed in different materials.
Stained-glass composition “Sleeping Chaucer” refers to the initial stage of the company “Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co..” She opens a series of seven plots illustrating the unfinished poem “The Legend of the Glorious Women”, created around 1385-1386. This work by Chaucer narrates about the author’s “love visions”, to which the god Amur and Altsesta appeared in a dream, the embodiment of conjugal devotion, which commanded him to write about the heroines of antiquity glorified by their virtue.