Maud Beddington was a pupil of Burne-Jones, whom her mother had known from Birmingham, where their families were neighbours. Maud’s father was Maurice Moses (he changed his name to Beddington in 1868), who amassed a fortune in the clothing trade and left £1m in his estate. When Maud died, a wealthy woman, she left several Burne-Joneses, including Vespertina Quies of 1893, which she had witnessed being painted, to the Tate.

Both Maud’s father and Burne-Jones died in 1898, in the year that this painting was first exhibited, at the New Gallery. Beddington had been encouraged to show the painting in public by Burne-Jones, as she remembered in a privately published pamphlet (Tate Reference Library), entitled NOTES by Maud Beddington about Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his Art:

Once when I told him I should like to exhibit my picture “Sleep” at the New Gallery, I said "I think my mother would like me to." He looked straight in front of him, quite angry—not with me but with the fact that I had said that. He knew, as I did, that I wanted it myself—and he would have thought it quite natural for me to want it. It was a great lesson to me—I don‘t think I have ever been deceitful in that way since! (Or hardly ever).

Indeed she was not ‘deceitful in that way‘, for four years later in 1902 she had a one-woman show at the Woodbury Gallery, in which she showed ten oils and fifty watercolours. It was noticed (in the Jewish Chronicle) that her work was divided into two kinds, watercolours of children, which were similar to the quiet contemplative pictures of Cayley Robinson and very different to her oils, which were ‘of a highly imaginative nature and breathing perhaps something of the expressive spirit which Miss Beddington may have involuntarily acquired from Sir E. Burne-Jones‘. The paintings were accompanied by passages from Dante, the Scriptures, and Matthew Arnold. The critic of the Jewish Chronicle wrote:

‘Sleep’ is shown in the person of a young girl lying asleep on the edge of a cliff, with head thrown back: three figures holding poppies significant of slumber, stand before her, and behind come a long array of spirit figures with floating hair, each one bringing a trail of suggestive poppies. 

(11 July 1902, issue 1736, p 20)