| Titania and Bottom | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Henry Fuseli |
| Year | c. 1790 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 217.2 cm× 275.6 cm(85.5 in× 108.5 in) |
| Location | Tate Britain, London |
Titania and Bottom is an oil painting by the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. It dates to around 1790 and is in 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.
Henry Fuseli had become familiar with William Shakespeare's plays as a student in Zürich. He used them as the basis for paintings throughout his career. He became famous for his treatment of supernatural matters, which gave a special appeal to A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with plays like The Tempest , Hamlet and Macbeth . [1]
Titania and Bottom was commissioned by the publisher John Boydell for his Shakespeare Gallery. Fuseli also made a large pendant for Boydell's gallery, Titania's Awakening, which depicts a later moment from the same scene. [2]
The painting depicts a moment from the first scene of the fourth act of William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania, Queen of the Fairies, is under the influence of a love potion, given to her by her husband Oberon to punish her for her pride. The potion has made her fall in love with the weaver Nick Bottom, who in turn is under a spell which has transformed his head into that of an ass. Titania stands next to the seated Bottom. Her right hand is raised and holds a wand and her left hand rests on the donkey's head. They are surrounded by a group of beings of different sizes, called by Titania to attend to Bottom. A fairy servant scratches Bottom's head and another stands on his hand, offering assistance. A girl to the right has brought a basket of dried peas. A hooded woman to the right is holding a changeling made of wax, and to the left is a group of children artificially created by witches. [1]
Titania's seductive pose is adapted from Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci. Two fairies plunging into calyces to the right are inspired by one of Sandro Botticelli's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy, "Canto XXX" from Paradiso . At the bottom left is a girl with a butterfly head, who follows a type of child portrait developed by Joshua Reynolds, where a child posing with a pet animal exhibits features from that animal. [1] A woman on the right is reminiscent of Jan Steen's sexually suggestive The Oyster Eater , but instead of offering an oyster, the woman holds a tiny old man in a leash, suggesting female sexual domination. [2] Like Titania's Awakening, the painting also borrows figures from works by the Dutch painter Abraham Bloemaert. [3]
Since 1887, the painting has been in the collection of the Tate galleries. It is exhibited at Tate Britain as part of the display Walk Through British Art. [1]
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Oberon is a king of the fairies in medieval and Renaissance literature. He is best known as a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which he is King of the Fairies and spouse of Titania, Queen of the Fairies.
The mechanicals are six characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream who perform the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe. They are a group of amateur and mostly incompetent actors from around Athens, looking to make names for themselves by having their production chosen among several acts as the courtly entertainment for the royal wedding party of Theseus and Hippolyta. The servant-spirit Puck describes them as "rude mechanicals" in Act III, Scene 2 of the play, in reference to their occupations as skilled manual laborers.
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
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.
Nick Bottom is a character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream who provides comic relief throughout the play. A weaver by trade, he is famously known for getting his head transformed into that of a donkey by the elusive Puck. Bottom and Puck are the only two characters who converse with and progress the three central stories in the whole play. Puck is first introduced in the fairies' story and creates the drama of the lovers' story by messing up who loves whom, and places the donkey head on Bottom's in his story. Similarly, Bottom is performing in a play in his story intending it to be presented in the lovers' story, as well as interacting with Titania in the fairies' story.
Titania is a character in William Shakespeare's 1595–1596 play A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. It shows a woman in deep sleep with her arms thrown below her, and with a demonic and ape-like incubus crouched on her chest. The painting's dreamlike and haunting erotic evocation of infatuation and obsession was a huge popular success.
The Fairy-Queen is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age of 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 1968 British film of William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Peter Hall.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 1999 fantasy romantic comedy film written, produced, and directed by Michael Hoffman, based on the 1600 play of the same name by William Shakespeare. The ensemble cast features Kevin Kline as Bottom, Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett as Titania and Oberon, Stanley Tucci as Puck, and Calista Flockhart, Anna Friel, Christian Bale, and Dominic West as the four lovers.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 1935 American film adaptation of the Shakespearean play of the same name. It is directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, produced by Warner Bros., and stars James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Muir, Joe E. Brown, Dick Powell, Ross Alexander, Anita Louise, Victor Jory and Ian Hunter. The screenplay, written by Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall Jr., is adapted from Reinhardt's Hollywood Bowl production of the play from the previous year.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a 1909 American film directed by Charles Kent and J. Stuart Blackton, and starring Walter Ackerman and Charles Chapman. It was the first film adaptation of the eponymous play by William Shakespeare. The movie was made during summer 1909, but not released until December 25.
The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, England, was the first stage of a three-part project initiated in November 1786 by engraver and publisher John Boydell in an effort to foster a school of British history painting. In addition to the establishment of the gallery, Boydell planned to produce an illustrated edition of William Shakespeare's plays and a folio of prints based upon a series of paintings by different contemporary painters. During the 1790s the London gallery that showed the original paintings emerged as the project's most popular element.
The 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was directed by Peter Brook, and is often known simply as Peter Brook'sDream. It opened in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon and then moved to the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End in 1971. It was taken on a world tour in 1972–1973. Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC is often described as one of the 20th century's most influential productions of Shakespeare, as it rejected many traditional ideas about the staging of classic drama.
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.
John Simmons (1823–1876) was a British miniature painter and illustrator, known primarily for his watercolours of ethereal fairyland scenes, often illustrating Shakespearian or other literary works. He was one of several popular Victorian artists who together created "a genre of forest idyll" in their fairy paintings. They are often grouped with the Pre-Raphaelites. Simmons lived in Bristol, and also painted portraits. He was elected to membership of the Bristol Academy of the Fine Arts in 1849. He died in November 1876 and is buried at Arnos Vale Cemetery.
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.
Le Songe d'une nuit d'été is a French TV film from 1969. It is based on A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, and was directed by Jean-Christophe Averty.
