Sleeping Beauty
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"Sleeping Beauty", also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a fairy tale about a princess cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years before being awakened by a handsome
The prince finds the Sleeping Beauty in love's kiss
An older image of the sleeping princess: Brünnhilde, surrounded by magical fire rather than roses (illustration by Arthur Rackham to Richard Wagner's Die Walküre)
Sleeping Beauty, by Henry Meynell Rheam, 1899
Sleeping Beauty is shown a spindle by the old woman. Sleeping Beauty, by Alexander Zick (1845–1907)
Charles Perrault
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Charles Perrault was a French author and member of the Académie Française. He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from earlier folk tales, published i
Sleeping Beauty
…as the first fully developed literary version of the story, published posthumously in 1634–36 in the Pentamerone. This was later adapted in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was one orally transmitted from the Perrault…
Portrait by Charles Le Brun, c. 1670
Perrault in an early 19th-century engraved frontispiece
Portrait of Perrault, c. 1685–1700 (the visible date of 1671 is when he was elected to the French Academy)