Victorian
Fairy Paintings
by
Terri Windling
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"Iris"
John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1886
Click image to enlarge |
According
to art historians, The Golden Age of Fairy Painting occurred in 19th-century
England during the reign of Queen Victoria, casting its spell of enchantment
on artists right up to the present day. During that time, fairy pictures
by eminent painters were hung in respectable galleries, viewed by the kind
of large audiences that now flock to blockbuster films.
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"Ill
Omen: Girl in the East Wind with Ravens Crossing the Moon"
Frances MacNair, 1893
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A number of factors combined to make Fairyland
so appealing to Victorian artists. First, using imagery from British folklore
(and from homegrown writers like Shakespeare, Pope, or the Romantic poets)
seemed a breath of fresh air to artists trained in the Royal Academy tradition,
in which classical myths or Biblical tales were touted as the "proper"
subject matter for serious paintings. Second, pictures of fairies and sprites
in lushly romantic natural settings were an aesthetic reaction to the gritty,
smoky, mechanized world of the Industrial Revolution, when large tracts
of English countryside swiftly vanished beneath mortar and brick. (This
also played a factor in the concurrent interest in Medievalism, promoted
by the Pre-Raphaelites as an antidote to modern, mass-produced life.) Third,
"folklore" was a new and exciting area of scholarship, giving
old country tales about spirits and fairies a cache they’d previously lacked.
Victorian interest in the "unseen world" was also evident in Spiritualism
(seances, spirit possession, etc.), a fad that swept like wildfire through
all classes of society. Finally, the wide-spread, casual use of medicines
derived from opium no doubt played some part in the 19th-century taste for
fantastic imagery . . . as well as the fact
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Detail
from
"The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania"
Joseph Noël Paton, 1849
Click image to enlarge |
that many of these "innocent"
paintings of elves, undines, and sylphs fairly dripped with sexuality, at
a time when sex was at its most repressed in polite British culture.
The Victorian obsession with Fairyland has
its roots in the previous century, where the subject was explored by the
Romantic poets and painters like Fuseli and Blake -- the latter of whom
made no bones about his personal belief in fairies. In the 19th century,
the emergence of Romantic ballet, often with fairy themes, had a strong
influence on a number of painters, as did the very first English publication
of the Grimms’ fairy tales (in 1823) and the popularity of texts by the
German Romantics like Goethe and de la Motte Fouqué. Shakespeare’s
fairy plays, which had inspired fine paintings by Reynolds and Fuseli in
the 1800s, continued to give artists the license to paint fairy subjects
in the next century: Joseph Noël Paton, Daniel Maclise, Robert Huskisson
and numerous others achieved success with magical pictures of Ariel, Oberon,
Titania, and Puck. The Pre-Raphaelite painters, whose subject matter was
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"Ferdinand
Lured by Ariel"
John Everett Millais
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often drawn from myths and legends,
rarely painted "the little people" themselves -- yet a single
fairy picture by John Everett Millais, "Ferdinand Lured by Ariel,"
was much admired by subsequent painters (although the original buyer rejected
the picture because the fairies were "too green"). Younger painters
in the "second wave" of Pre-Raphaelitism (including E. R. Hughes,
Eleanor Fortescue-Birckdale, John Atkinson Grimshaw, the Birmingham Group,
and the Celtic Revivalists in Scotland) turned to fairy subjects more regularly
-- not only in gallery paintings but in a wide variety of arts & crafts.
Margaret Macdonald McIntosh, Frances Macdonald MacNair, Jessie M. King,
Annie French, and the other "Glasgow Girls" in Scotland from the
1880s onward created fairy imagery in metalwork, jewelry, ceramics, textiles,
and even furniture design, in addition to gallery paintings, murals, and
illustrated books.
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Detail
from
"The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke"
Richard Dadd, 1855-64
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Richard Dadd is the painter considered the
quintessential Victorian fairy artist. He peopled his canvases with creatures
drawn both from British fairy literature and the archetypes of rural fairy
lore: miniaturized beings depicted in naturalistic, highly detailed settings.
(Victorians like Dadd have been accused of "inventing" the idea
of diminutive fairies --- but fairies of all sizes populate the oldest
of British accounts.) As a student at the Royal Academy in London, Dadd
painted unremarkable works of landscape, marine, and animal subjects; he
then traveled on a tour of the Middle East, after which his whole life shattered.
During this trip, Dadd became so feverishly excited (as he wrote in a letter
to a friend) that he doubted his own sanity . . . an
idea with which his doctor concurred when Dadd returned to London. The painter’s
father took him to the countryside for a rest, on the doctor’s advice. Soon
after, Dadd stabbed his father to death -- and then the artist fled to France,
where he planned to murder the Emperor of Austria, and stabbed a total stranger
instead. Arrested and brought back to England, Dadd was placed in a mental
asylum called Bethlem. The artist was allowed his brushes and paints (by
all accounts, he was usually the gentlest of men), and it was in Bethlem
that he produced his gorgeously detailed fairy paintings. Best known of
these is Dadd’s masterwork, "The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke"
(popularized by the rock group Queen in a song from the 1970s).
Richard ("Dickie") Doyle, like
Richard Dadd, portrayed Fairyland as a miniaturized world where sprites
could be found in
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"The
Triumphal March of the Elf King"
Richard Doyle, 1870
Click image to enlarge |
the shadows beneath fallen leaves
and behind every blade of grass. Best known for his book illustrations (such
as his classic volume In
Fairyland), Doyle also painted large fairy pictures in watercolors
and oils, usually peopled with hundreds of fairies, intricately, minutely
rendered. His brother Charles (the father of Arthur Conan Doyle) was also
an artist who
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"Self-Portrait,
A Meditation"
Charles Doyle, 1885-93
Click image to enlarge |
specialized in fantasy imagery,
but unlike Dickie (reported to be a "singularly sweet and noble type
of English gentleman"), Charles became a severe alcoholic, eventually
broke down altogether, and ended up in a mental asylum -- where he created
his haunting, disturbing watercolors full of magical creatures. John Anster
Fitzgerald (known as "Fairy Fitzgerald"), born in London of Irish
ancestry, was another painter whose art work had a bizarre and disturbing
quality -- most likely due to opium-smoking and the use of laudanum, an
opium derivative. Regular opium use engenders dreams, fantasias, and hallucinations
of richly colored intensity, both sensual and sinister -- which aptly describes
the fairy paintings to which Fitzgerald dedicated his life. As in a surprising
number of Victorian fairy paintings, the luminous world conjured by Fitzgerald
becomes sinister with a closer look, filled as it is with perverse little
fairies cheerfully engaged in abusing birds, insects, mice, and other creatures.
Fitzgerald’s "dream pictures" are even stranger populated by goblinesque
figures proffering transparent glasses of mysterious brews, or bottles in
the shape of laudanum vials. Caught halfway between dream and nightmare,
these fine paintings are among Fitzgerald’s best work, anticipating the
images of 20th-century Surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst.
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Detail
from
"The Captive Robin"
John Anster Fitzgerald, 1864
Click image to enlarge |
The Golden Age of Fairy Painting is said
to have ended in the 1870s . . . but (like all things
fey) it did not die, it merely shape-shifted, and the Victorian passion
for fairies found new expression in illustrated books. From the end of the
1900s through the early years of the 20th century, an extraordinary number
of top illustrators were living,
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"Come,
Now a Roundel"
Arthur Rackham, 1908
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working, and publishing in England,
including Walter Crane, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, Eleanor Vere Boyle,
Charles and William Heath Robinson, Emma Florence Harrison, Margaret Tarrant,
and others too numerous to list. Aided by advances in printing techniques
(as well as by rising literacy and wealth within the middle class), beautiful
illustrated books enjoyed unprecedented success, popular not only with children
but also with art-loving adults. Many of these volumes contained old fairy
tales, or magical stories by contemporary writers (Dickens, Thackery, Macdonald,
Wilde, Carroll, and Kipling to name just a few), creating a wealth of fairy
imagery that remains unequaled today. The very best of the artists of this
time were Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, whose works went on to color
the dreams of generations of children the world over. Arthur Rackham had
studied art at night school while working for an insurance company; in the
1890s he began to illustrate books and magazines in London, achieving success
with his paintings for Tales from Shakespeare and Grimms’ Fairy
Tales. Subsequent fairy books included Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill
and (most famously) Rackham’s collaboration with J. M. Barrie: Peter
Pan in Kensington Garden. Edmund Dulac, although generally known as
an English artist, was raised and educated in France. A life-long Anglophile,
Dulac moved to London in 1906, where he changed his name from Edmond to
Edmund and made a name for himself as the illustrator of The Arabian
Nights, The Snow Queen, and other fine books.
All of these artists, from Dadd to Dulac,
have informed and inspired painters of magical pictures right down to this
day -- particularly artists in the fantasy genre, as well as writers of
fantasy fiction. (John Crowley’s Little,
Big,
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"Ye
Elves of the Hills, Brooks, Standing Lakes, and Groves"
Edmund Dulac
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Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms
of Elfin, and Neil Gaiman’s Stardust
are just three of the many books clearly influenced by such imagery.) Modern
painters as diverse as Brian Froud, Alan
Lee, James Christensen, Gennady Spirin, Lizbeth Zwerger, and Charles
Vess are all working, in their different ways, to update the Golden
Age tradition, as are sculptor Wendy Froud,
photographer Suza Scalora, and a host of others. In 1997, the Royal Academy
in London and the University of Iowa Museum of Art joined forces to curate
a major show of Victorian Fairy Painting, prompting an overdue reappraisal
of these unusual works by scholars and critics. The catalog from that show
has been published under the title Victorian
Fairy Painting (text by Jeremy Maas, et al.) -- an excellent source
for viewing a broader range of fairy paintings than this page will allow.
Also recommended: Fairies
in Victorian Paintings by Christopher Wood and Glasgow
Girls by Jude Burkhauser, as well as The Faeryland Companion
by Beatrice Phillipotts (available only through Barnes & Noble) and
The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art, edited
by John Christian (available only through secondhand bookshops). The poet
William Butler Yeats, a great champion of fairies, once wrote that a man
can’t lift his hand without influencing and being influenced by hordes of
them. This seems especially true of the Golden Age painters, and the result
is pure magic.
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Detail
from
"Midsummer Eve"
E. R. Hughes, 1909
Click image to enlarge |
Copyright © 2001 by Terri Windling.
Copyright © by
The Endicott Studio.
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