Fairy painting

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Fairy painting is a genre of painting and illustration featuring fairies and fairy tale settings, often with extreme attention to detail. The genre is most closely associated with Victorian painting in the United Kingdom but has experienced a contemporary revival. Moreover, fairy painting was also seen as escapism for Victorians.

Contents

Origins and influences

Titania and Bottom. Oil on canvas by Henry Fuseli, c. 1790 Henry Fuseli - Titania and Bottom - Google Art Project.jpg
Titania and Bottom . Oil on canvas by Henry Fuseli, c. 1790

Despite its whimsical appearance, fairy painting is strongly rooted in the literary and theatrical influences of Romanticism and the cultural issues facing the Victorian era. Among the most significant of these influences were the fantasy themes of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest . Other literary works, such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Alexander Pope's mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock , have been cited as contributing influences as well. [1] Innovations in stage production helped bring these works to the public eye, as the development of gaslight and improvements in wire-work led to increasingly elaborate special effects. Although once described by Douglas Jerrold as "a fairy creation that could only be acted by fairies", [2] productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream became more common, eventually leading to an 1863 spectacle featuring Ellen Terry as Titania astride a mechanical mushroom. [3]

Cultural changes were also an important factor during this period. Continuing industrialization was uprooting longstanding traditions, and rapid advances in science and technology, especially the invention of photography, left some people discomforted and confused. According to Jeremy Maas, the turn to mythological and fantasy elements, and in particular to the fairy's world, allowed an escape from these demands. "No other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements of the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the drear hardships of daily existence; the stirrings of new attitudes toward sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; the birth of psychoanalysis; the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography." [4] The significance of fairy paintings as a reaction to cultural change is not universally accepted, however. "Ultimately," Andrew Stuttaford wrote, "these paintings were just about fun." [5]

Victorian fairy painting

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. Oil on canvas by Richard Dadd 1855-1864. Image-Dadd - Fairy Feller's.jpg
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke . Oil on canvas by Richard Dadd 1855–1864.
The Captive Robin by John Anster Fitzgerald, c. 1864 The captive robin.jpg
The Captive Robin by John Anster Fitzgerald, c. 1864

The earliest artists considered to have contributed to the genre predate much of Romanticism and the Victorian era. Henry Fuseli and William Blake produced works that would be indicative of the later genre even before 1800. [6] However, the artist most closely associated with fairy painting was outsider artist Richard Dadd, who was suspected to have schizophrenia and produced most of his work while incarcerated in the Bethlem psychiatric hospital for the murder of his father. [7] Despite his status and condition, his fantastic subjects and extraordinarily detailed style were generally well-received, with one period reviewer describing his work as "exquisitely ideal". [8] He accompanied his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke , which he painted from 1855 to 1864, with an elaborate poem which provides historical, literary, or mythological context to each of the depicted characters. [9]

Fairy painting was not exclusively the domain of outside art, however. The work of John Anster Fitzgerald debuted at London's Royal Academy. His work, a series of Christmas-themed fairy illustrations, received wider public visibility in the Illustrated London News. The Scottish artist Joseph Noel Paton exhibited two immensely detailed paintings, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania and The Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon, based on the popular fairy scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Edwin Landseer, sometimes named "Victoria's favourite artist", produced a painting of Titania and Bottom in the genre's style, his Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream . [5]

The genre also influenced the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the movement it began. Co-founder John Everett Millais produced a series of fairy paintings based on The Tempest, ending with his 1849 work Ferdinand Lured by Ariel . [10] Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another of the Brotherhood's initial members, took a more sensual approach to the subject, in both painting and poetry. [11] Others involved with the movement, such as Arthur Hughes and William Bell Scott, also contributed to the genre.

Although the Cottingley Fairies briefly revived interest in fae subjects, the waning of Romanticism and the advent of World War I reduced interest in the styles and topics popular during the Victorian era. The illustrated fairy-tale books of Arthur Rackham are considered its "final flowering". [6]

Modern revival

The interest in fantasy art and literature since the 1970s has seen a revival in the topics and styles of Victorian fairy painting, often in novel contexts. While artists such as Stephanie Pui-Mun Law have produced genre illustrations for book covers and role-playing games, the works of Brian Froud, also known for a series of illustrated fairy books, have been adapted into several successful motion pictures including The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986). The concept design work of Alan Lee and John Howe for The Lord of the Rings (film series) (2001–03), for which the former won an Oscar, would change popular perceptions of the depiction of fairy cultures. The 2003 book, The Art of Faery, written by David Riche and mentored by Froud, contributed to the careers of twenty fairy artists of this revival movement, including Amy Brown, Myrea Pettit, Jasmine Becket-Griffith, Philippe Fernandez, James Browne, and Jessica Galbreth, many of whom went on to author individual art books. Depictions of fae have made their way into popular culture in other ways, including clothing designs, ceramics, figurines, needlecraft, figurative art, and quilting, many marketed through Hot Topic to an international market online. Part of the growth in popularity over the past three decades is due to the New Age Movement. Renaissance fairs and science fiction conventions have also developed modern fairy art as a genre of collectibles.

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Eleanor Vere Boyle (1825–1916) was an artist of the Victorian era whose work consisted mainly of watercolor illustrations in children's books. These illustrations were strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, being highly detailed and haunting in content. Love and death were popular subject matter of Pre-Raphaelite art and something that can be seen in Eleanor Vere Boyle's work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, even called her work "great in design." However, even though she was one of the first woman artists to be recognized for her achievements, she did not exhibit or sell work often as it was not acceptable given her family's social status. Thus, she signed her works “EVB” to obscure her identity and quickly became one of the most important female illustrators in the 1860s.

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Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom is an 1851 oil-on-canvas painting by British artist Edwin Landseer. Landseer was mainly known for his paintings of animals: this is his only painting of a fairy scene. The painting depicts a scene from the third act of William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. It has been in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia since 1932.

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<i>The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania</i> 1849 painting by Sir Joseph Noel Paton

The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania is an oil on canvas painting by the Scottish artist Sir Joseph Noel Paton. Painted in 1849, it depicts the scene from William Shakespeare's comedy play A Midsummer Night's Dream, when the fairy queen Titania and fairy king Oberon quarrel; Oberon was considered the King of the fairies in medieval and Renaissance literature. When exhibited in Edinburgh during 1850, it was declared as the "painting of the season". It was acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland in 1897, having initially been bought by the Royal Association for Promoting the Fine Arts in Scotland during 1850. An earlier version of this painting was Paton's diploma picture, which was submitted to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1846; they paid £700 for it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victorian painting</span> British painting from 1837 to 1901during the 19th century

Victorian painting refers to the distinctive styles of painting in the United Kingdom during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). Victoria's early reign was characterised by rapid industrial development and social and political change, which made the United Kingdom one of the most powerful and advanced nations in the world. Painting in the early years of her reign was dominated by the Royal Academy of Arts and by the theories of its first president, Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds and the academy were strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, and believed that it was the role of an artist to make the subject of their work appear as noble and idealised as possible. This had proved a successful approach for artists in the pre-industrial period, where the main subjects of artistic commissions were portraits of the nobility and military and historical scenes. By the time of Victoria's accession to the throne, this approach was coming to be seen as stale and outdated. The rise of the wealthy middle class had changed the art market, and a generation who had grown up in an industrial age believed in the importance of accuracy and attention to detail, and that the role of art was to reflect the world, not to idealise it.

<i>Titania and Bottom</i> Painting by Henry Fuseli

Titania and Bottom is an oil painting by the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. It dates to around 1790 and is displayed at Tate Britain, in London. It was commissioned for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery and depicts a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare.

References

  1. ↑ "Victorian Fairy Painting from the Frick Collection". Antiques and the Arts Online. Archived from the original on 2007-02-04. Retrieved 2007-01-10.
  2. ↑ Phelps, W. May; John Forbes-Robertson (1886). The Life and Life-Work of Samuel Phelps. Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.
  3. ↑ Wells, Stanley (2000). Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-871176-6.
  4. ↑ Maas, Jeremy (1997). Victorian Fairy Painting. Merrell Holberton. ISBN   978-0-900946-58-5.
  5. 1 2 Stuttaford, Andrew (1998-12-31). "Feywatch". National Review.
  6. 1 2 "Fairy Painting". Tate Glossary. Tate Collection. Retrieved 2008-01-10.
  7. ↑ Allderidge, Patricia (1974). The Late Richard Dadd, 1817–1886 . Tate Gallery. ISBN   978-0-900874-79-6.
  8. ↑ "Etched Thoughts by the Etching Club". Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (346). August 1844.
  9. ↑ MacGregor, John (1989). The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton University Press. ISBN   0-691-04071-0.
  10. ↑ Bennett, Mary (August 1984). "An Early Drawing for 'The Tempest' by Everett Millais". Burlington Magazine (126).
  11. ↑ Treuherz, Jan, Liz Prettejohn and Edwin Becker (2003-11-24). Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Thames & Hudson. ISBN   978-0-500-09316-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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