A Few Words First
Most of my favourite newsletters are the ones I’ve not written. Not principally because some generous soul has spared me racing against looming deadlines, but because the texts written by talented authors who generously allow me to reproduce them here are always a delight to discover.
Charlotte Zeepvat is, in her own words, a “compulsive researcher, endlessly fascinated by finding things out, model maker, painter (never quite finding the skill to match the pictures in my head but still game to try) and would-be but probably-never-will-be illustrator, historian by training, writer, and collector of old photographs.” She writes books, occasionally illustrates them, and knows astonishing things about subjects few have heard of or even considered.
Charlotte has a web site, currently with hoarding all about and “Under Construction” signs up all around, and very politely declined my offer to list her books because they “probably won’t be of much interest to anyone who wants fantasy and fairies.” So, you’ll have to look up her work on your own. You can also take her qualification of “would-be but probably-never-will-be illustrator” with a grain of salt. Her artwork is detailed and exquisite.
But, in the meantime, read on, and do mind the fairies.
If I mentioned flower fairies would you run for cover? It sounds a world away from the darker, edgier ‘faeries’ of modern fantasy art but I used to love Cicely Mary Barker’s little Flower Fairy books, with their delicate watercolour illustrations of wild or garden plants. She painted her flowers from life, each one botanically accurate and accompanied by an attendant fairy (also painted from life), a pretty child with butterfly wings, dressed in a costume that echoes the form and colour of the petals and leaves and, in intention at least, posed to capture something of the plant’s character. It’s all very innocent, very sweet, suggesting no hint of the danger that has always been the shadow side of dealings with fairies. Tolkien’s Faerie held ‘beauty that is an enchantment and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.’ CMB showed Faerie on its best behaviour, hair brushed and party dress on, ready to play in the nursery.
She was born in the closing years of Victoria’s reign, when fairies had dwindled to an entertainment for children. But earlier, for at least three, maybe four decades of the mid-19th century, fairy painting was a fashionable theme in mainstream British art, taken seriously even by such august bodies as the Royal Academy and very definitely for the grown-ups. It was an extremely British fantasy, offering escape from a world that was becoming increasingly mechanised and industrialized. It celebrated new developments in the theatre. Most important, it gave artists a context in which to explore things that were otherwise unacceptable in respectable circles: nudity and sex, the use of opiates, dreams, nightmares and the stranger reaches of the human mind.
Several things combined to bring this about. The first was the Romantic movement of the mid-18th century, which affected the whole spectrum of art, literature, music, and thought. Romanticism stressed the importance of emotion, intuition and imagination. It argued for a new appreciation of untamed nature; nature was powerful and in time it would overwhelm the work of man. Romanticism valued the past too, reviving interest in the medieval world and in oral traditions, folklore, folk art and customs; new collections of this material led in turn to a rise in national awareness (and opened several doors through which Faerie could easily slip).
In Britain the art world had been dominated for centuries by Classical subjects and the best commissions went to foreign artists. Now there were calls for a national school of art. In 1746 William Hogarth set up a venue at the Foundling Hospital in London where artists could show their work and 1768 saw the foundation of the Royal Academy, to raise the professional status of British artists through education and to showcase their work.
Enter the unlikely figure of a London Alderman. John Boydell was an engraver who built a substantial fortune publishing and selling prints and he had every sympathy with the artists; his own pet grievance was French domination of the continental print trade. At a dinner party in 1786 someone suggested a new edition of Shakespeare, illustrated by the best artists of the day, and Boydell seized the idea and ran with it. He planned not only the edition but also a folio of different Shakespeare engravings (to maximize sales) and a purpose-built gallery for the original paintings. The gallery opened in Pall Mall in 1789, with new pictures being added as the work progressed, and publication, by public suscription, began in 1791. The whole venture was a resounding success, particularly the gallery, which became a fashionable attraction. And there were fairy paintings among its treasures, illustrating a Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Macbeth. The Swiss artist John Henry Fuseli had a flair for supernatural subjects and he painted Puck, Oberon and Titania, and Macbeth’s witches: Fuseli would have considerable influence over later fairy painters. But at the time Boydell’s biggest coup lay in persuading Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, to contibute. He was paid £1500 – at least six times the salary of the other artists – and given a free choice of subject.
Reynolds painted Puck, as a chubby baby, naked save for a strategic cloth, against a generic landscape background. It looks like any other Reynolds child portrait, save for the fact that Puck has the pointy ears and upswept eyebrows we associate now with fairies, elves and their kin. It’s a curious detail which begs the question, if this was one of the first fairy paintings, where did the iconography come from?
The success of Boydell’s Gallery established the plays, and with them the fairies, as acceptable subjects for serious painting. In 1832 the landscape painter Francis Danby produced ‘Oberon and Titania, Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in which the tiny winged figures are lit by a haunting blend of moon and glow worm light. The Dream was by far the most popular subject for fairy painters but Danby’s ‘Fairies by a Rocky Stream’ is an early example of a fairy subject not from Shakespeare, as is ‘Pan and the Fairies’, painted in 1834 by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise, who moved to London in the 1820s to study at the Academy.
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Left: Two of Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies (From Flower Fairies of the Wayside, 1940s)
Centre: From Boydell’s Gallery:
1. Puck, by Sir Joshua Reynolds
2. Engraving of John Henry Fuseli’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Right: Early fairy paintings:
1. Francis Danby, ‘Oberon and Titania, Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream’
2. Daniel Maclise, ‘Pan and the Fairies’ (the title was changed to ‘Faun and the Fairies’ some time later when the painting was used as an illustration
3. Maclise, ‘Priscilla Horton as Ariel’
Maclise made his name with large-scale history paintings but he was also a portrait painter and it’s one of his portraits from the 1830s, ‘Priscilla Horton as Ariel’ which introduces the third theme in fairy painting’s rise. First Romanticism, then Shakespeare, now the theatre. Horton played Ariel in William Macready’s 1838 production of The Tempest, a wildly extravagant and very popular production in which she delivered her lines as she flew over the stage on wires. That same year Macready put on an equally lavish, equally lucrative version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which offered the first complete performance of the text since Shakespeare’s day, a fairy ballet and all manner of spectacular effects. Both Oberon and Puck were played by women. In 1840 the role of Oberon was taken by Elizabeth Vestris, who was famous for her legs. Popular engravings often showed her in knee-length costumes, raising her skirt a coy few inches; no wonder the association grew between fairies and sex.
The success of these productions and others like them fuelled the demand for paintings of fairies and they also affected the way both artists and public viewed them, not only in terms of the actors but also the stage itself. Gaslight had been introduced to the theatre in 1817 and the 1820s saw the invention of ‘limelight’ – calcium light – with its brilliant contrasts. Most fairy paintings of the mid-century were strongly influenced by stage lighting.
By the 1840s fairies were everywhere – in the theatre, the ballet, the opera, and books, and fairy painting was attracting both older, established artists and newcomers, keen to make their name. In 1841 fairy paintings by a 22-year-old former student of the Academy, Richard Dadd, received an enthusiastic reception from the critics. ‘Puck’, which combined elements of Maclise’s ‘Pan and the Fairies’ and Reynolds’ ‘Puck’ with a strangeness unique to Dadd, was praised for its mysterious, dramatic lighting when it was shown at the Society of British Artists. ‘Titania Sleeping’, exhibited at the Academy that summer, led to predictions of a bright future for Dadd and in 1842 he scored another critical triumph with ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, a vision of semi-naked dancing fairies illustrating Ariel’s song from The Tempest. There was only one critical comment, that the sand wasn’t yellow; this came from John Eagles of Blackwood’s Magazine, who would later attack Ruskin for his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites. But Dadd’s career was tragically short. He suffered a form of mental breakdown, killed his father in 1843 and fled to France, where he stabbed a tourist, was captured, and came home to spend the rest of his life in mental institutions. But he was still encouraged to work and in the 1850 and 60s produced two of the most important Victorian fairy paintings, ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ and ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’; these were not seen in public until the 1930s.
In 1845 a young Richard Doyle, later to become one of the best-loved fairy illustrators, exhibited ‘The Enchanted Fairy Tree’ at the Academy. Turner was approaching the end of his career in 1846 when he tried his hand with ‘Queen Mab’s Dream’, and 1847 saw a clutch of significant fairy paintings, including Robert Huskisson’s ‘There Sleeps Titania’ and ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’. These were a critical success at the Academy, where it was predicted that Huskisson would play a leading role in British art. He was one of the first to make fairy painting his speciality but people mocked his thick Nottinghamshire accent and lack of education and after 1854 he ceased to exhibit.
Joseph Noel Paton was more successful. A friend of Millais at the Academy Schools, Paton’s first fairy painting , ‘The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania’ won a £300 prize in the 1847 Westminster Hall Competition. Paton shared many of Millais’ ideas and would probably have joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood if he had stayed in England. But he preferred his native Scotland, securing admission to the Royal Scottish Academy with another fairy picture. In 1849, the year after the formation of the PRB, Paton produced the companion picture to his ‘Reconciliation’, ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’. This caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Scottish Academy in 1850 and it remained a very fashionable painting: no one seemed to notice, or mind, the amount of erotic imagery in the densely packed swirl of naked fairies round the king and queen. In 1857 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), said he had counted 165 fairies in the painting but he seemed oblivious to what they were doing.
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Left: Richard Dadd:
1. Engraving of ‘Puck’, 1841
2. ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, 1842
3. ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’
Centre:
1. Richard Doyle, ‘The Enchanted Fairy Tree’
2. Joseph Noel Paton, ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’
Right: The Pre-Raphaelites:
1. John Everett Millais, ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’
2. William Bell Scott, ‘Cockcrow’
3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Maids of Elfin Mere’
The bright colours and closely observed details in ‘The Quarrel’ echoed the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites and in the same year that Paton was working on the picture his friend Millais was painting one of his first major pieces in the Pre-Raphaelite style. ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’ illustrates the same scene as ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, but where Dadd and Huskisson took the words of Ariel’s song, Millais showed its effect on the listening Ferdinand. He rejected the theatrical approach altogether and set his scene in a natural landscape. A dealer reserved the painting in advance and Millais spent weeks in an Oxfordshire garden painstakingly recreating what he saw. But the dealer rejected the painting because of the fairies; if he’d been expecting a glamorous actress, Millais’ bright green Ariel, ringed by a circle of equally green bat-like goblins, was probably something of a shock.
William Bell Scott, a friend of Rossetti, painted fairies in ‘Cockcrow’ in 1856, also some scenes from The Tempest’, but the PRB themselves did not tackle any further fairy paintings. Their influence is obvious in the bright colours and attention to detail in the work of other fairy painters but their own contribution was mainly in illustration. In 1855 Rossetti, Millais and Arthur Hughes were commissioned to illustrate a collection of fairy poems by William Allingham; Rossetti’s ‘The Maids of Elfin Mere’, depicting a very different, dream-like form of human enchantress, drew both Burne-Jones and William Morris to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In 1862 Rossetti illustrated his sister Christina’s poem Goblin Market.
Dreams played an important part in the work of the most original, and after Dadd, probably the most important of all the fairy painters. John Anster Fitzgerald made his living with portraits and drawings for the Illustrated London News but his real subject was fairies. He painted a series of dream images, where a sleeping figure – in one case himself, in others a young woman – is surrounded by a series of weird goblins reminiscent of Bosch or Brueghel, humorous or menacing by turns. Often he hints at the use of opiates. Fitzgerald’s fairies are plucked straight from his imagination: tiny or human-sized, pretty or grotesque, dressed in historical costumes, flowers, or a mixture of both, they inhabit brightly coloured landscapes, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at odds with his meticulously painted birds and animals. In watercolour Fitzgerald’s fairies are more impressionistic and ethereal but all his paintings have a hallucinatory quality with a faintly disturbing edge. All the known examples date from the 1850s and 60s and his later career is a mystery but he lived until 1906 and some years afterwards a friend recalled, ‘He was known as ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ from the fact that his work, both colour and black-and-white, was devoted to fairy scenes, in fact his life was one long Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
By the 1860s much fairy painting focussed on the female nude, with a declining interest in narrative. Thomas Heatherley, who taught Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Millais, tried his hand at fairy painting; his ‘Fairy Seated on a Mushroom’ of 1860 shows the back view of a naked woman, not very well covered by her extremely long hair, a troop of flying fairies and, around her feet, some colourful and surreal little figures. The painter John Simmons attempted some scenes from Shakespeare but most of his fairy pictures are unashamedly erotic; idealised nudes, elegantly posed and beautifully painted, acceptable to Victorian taste only because they have wings and are therefore not human.
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Left: John Anster Fitzgerald:
1. ‘The Stuff Dreams are Made Of’
2. ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’
Centre: The fairy as pin-up
1. Thomas Heatherley, ‘Fairy Seated on a Mushroom’
2. John Simmons, ‘Titania’
Right: The mood changes:
1. Joseph Noel Paton, ‘The Fairy Rade’
2. Thomas Maybank, ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’
But the mood was changing. In 1855 Joseph Noel Paton, who had built his reputation on the Oberon and Titania paintings and other fairy pictures in the same vein, painted ‘The Pursuit of Pleasure’, in which a very attractive naked fairy is followed by a crowd of revellers. Unseen above their heads is the painter’s comment: the shadowy figure of an angel with a drawn sword. Paton painted his last fairy picture in 1867, taking his theme from Scottish folklore. ‘The Fairy Rade’ shows a troop of fairies carrying a changeling child. On one side is the dark forest through which they have come, on the other a twilit hillside with three standing stones. The painting is as crowded and meticulous as Paton’s earlier work, the detail as fine, but these fairies are fully dressed in medieval costume. In keeping with a general tightening in public morality, fairyland was being reinvented as a subject for all the family and the step from there to the nursery was a short one. The art establishment was also turning its back. The reviewer of Blackwood’s Magazine loved ‘The Fairy Rade’ but the Athenaeum dismissed it as ‘a work of the ‘illustrated book’ class,’ (there’s an insult), insinuating that the subject itself was not worthy of such a large-scale treatment.
And increasingly from the 1870s onwards, the task of bringing Faerie to life was left to the illustrators – Richard Doyle, Gustav Doré, Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham and others, including CMB, many of them as brilliant and original in their work, ‘illustrated book class’ or not. But the art world had moved on and fairies were just for the children. One painting says it all. Thomas Maybank’s ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’ of 1906 takes the same scene that Dadd and Huskisson painted but in the place of their scantily clad, otherworldly fairies a troop of cute cherubs play in the surf. Instead of their moody darkness, lit by brilliant flares of light, Maybank paints a sunny day – and his sand is definitely yellow.
Charlotte Zeepvat, August 2011
