In his final speech of The Tempest, Prospero recognizes the necessity for a friendly collusion between the audience and the performer in order that the illusion of fantasy prevails. Victorian fairy painters and illustrators depended upon a similar supportive relationship as they conjured up ‘realms of faerie’ for appreciative spectators. Their enthusiastic admirers included such diverse luminaries as Queen Victoria, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, and Samuel Carter Hall. Fairy paintings appeared regularly in Royal Academy exhibitions throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. Most of the artists from the early Victorian period took their subjects from the plays of Shakespeare, most notably A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, and the poetry of Milton and Spenser. They usually added imaginative details to these works culled from folklore and fairy tales. An even larger audience for fairy images emerged with the expanding readership of illustrated books and magazines after mid‐century.
Artists chose to paint fairy pictures for a variety of reasons. Some artists, like Daniel Maclise, Richard Dadd, and Joseph Noël Paton, chose fairy painting as one way to establish their professional careers and to solicit critical and public recognition. Other artists, such as John Anster Fitzgerald, John Simmons, Robert Huskisson, and John Atkinson Grimshaw, developed a popular following for their small fantasy works, which mixed fairy scenes with eroticism and dream imagery. The Pre‐Raphaelite artists John Everett Millais, William Bell Scott, and Arthur Hughes found an interest in fairy subject‐matter that engaged them with varied success. Of the three, Hughes went on to make a name for himself as a fantasy illustrator.
Not all artists chose an academic career as the best route to public approbation. George Cruikshank and Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle, for example, were the successful founders of a century‐long dynasty of Victorian fairy illustration. Cruikshank's art acted as a link between the satirical broadsides of the Regency period and the moral bromides of the early Victorian era. Doyle helped initiate the Victorian revolution in popular media with his contributions to the satirical journal Punch and his illustrations to Charles Dickens's Christmas novels. By the 1870s, Doyle had become one of the most prominent fairy illustrators in a field that included his brother Charles Altamont Doyle, Arthur Hughes, Kate Greenaway, and Eleanor Vere Boyle. At the end of the century, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, John Dickson Batten, Henry Justice Ford, Robert Anning Bell, Jessie M. King, and the Robinson brothers (Charles, William Heath, and Thomas Heath) developed the fairy vocabulary into a variety of sophisticated illustrative styles, both in colour and in black and white. All of these artists contributed to the popularity of fairy imagery through their illustrations in novels, fairy‐tale collections, folklore studies, engraved folios, and popular journals.
Fairy painting would seem to be a quintessentially Victorian product, yet its roots lie firmly within late 18th‐century British art. Henry Fuseli recognized the potential for fairy painting to both entertain and edify the British public. Fuseli, in his efforts to establish a new kind of poetic history painting, established the basic vocabulary of the genre: the quotation of high art and literature, the addition of folkloric themes, and the establishment of a central narrative scene surrounded by collaborative vignettes. In his works for Alderman John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, Titania and Bottom (c.1780–90) and Titania's Awakening (1793–4), he set the standards for a new kind of literary history painting. His influence would be felt later in both Victorian fairy painting and illustration, especially in his handling of multiple vignettes that comment upon the central action.
William Blake (1757–1827) also incorporated fairy imagery and lore into his idiosyncratic cosmology. Unlike Fuseli, he had no interest in the grand scale of history painting, preferring to work with the media of engraving and watercolour. He saw fairies as nature elementals. In Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c.1785), the artist conceives of fairies as nature worshippers, miniature druidic celebrants of the corporeal earth. Blake depicts the king and queen of the fairies presiding over a free‐spirited dance, a ‘fairy ring’. He differs from Fuseli's approach to the fairy painting by concentrating solely on the diminutive participants and giving the fairies wings, which add to the airy feeling of the dance. Where Fuseli had set the tone for literary history painting, Blake provided the model for an imaginative use of scale and schemata of body language for future artists to use when dealing with fairy subjects. At the same time, Blake served as a spiritual godfather to artists searching for visual metaphors for poetic inspiration in fantasy art.
Surprisingly, the romantic era saw little important work in fairy painting. Artists like Henry Singleton (1766–1839), Henry Howard (1769–1847), Frank Howard (1805–66), and Joshua Cristall (1767–1847) carried on the tradition in small‐scale works. These works, however, did little but sustain the prevailing types established by Blake and Fuseli of diminutive figures closely associated with the world of flora and fauna. A more productive expansion of fairy lore came out of the writings of such folklorists as Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), Nathan Drake (1766–1836), Thomas Crofton Croker, and Thomas Keightley (1789–1872). Most important, an English translation of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) appeared in 1823. The publication of these various collections of ballads, plays, folklore, and fairy tales throughout the Victorian era would offer alternative literary sources for fairy painters and illustrators to those sources associated with the Shakespearian tradition.
Francis Danby (1793–1861), an Irish artist, and David Scott (1806–49), a Scot, represent two notable exceptions to the general lack of inventiveness in fairy painting during the romantic era. Danby painted two watercolour versions of Scene from a Midsummer Night's Dream (1832) during a period of self‐imposed exile in Switzerland. The works have a Blakean simplicity made evocative through the addition of a moonlit landscape as a setting and the imaginative use of scale and vantage point. Scott, in contrast, grafted the theatricality of Fuseli onto the poetic expressivity of Blake and imbued the mixture with his own peculiar metaphysical temperament. He drives the pictorial narrative of his fairy paintings Ariel and Caliban (1837) and Puck Fleeing the Dawn (1837) with deliberately asymmetrical compositions, an innovative use of body language and expression, and a robustly applied paint surface. Neither Danby's nor Scott's fairy paintings would have much of an immediate impact upon the Royal Academy and the London art scene, however. Danby, despite the popularity of such fantasy landscape paintings as The Enchanted Island (1825) and The Wood‐Nymph's Hymn to the Rising Sun (1845) suffered from a covert ostracization within the academic hierarchy, while Scott, despite a legendary reputation among younger Scottish artists, led an isolated existence cut short by his death at a relatively young age.
The work of the Irish artist Daniel Maclise (1806–70) represents a more viable link between the Academy and fairy painting, as well as the shift from romantic to Victorian art. He recognized early in his career the possibilities of fairy imagery; his first published drawings appeared, etched by W. H. Brooke, in Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions in the South of Ireland (1826). The young artist entered the Royal Academy in 1828. By the beginning of the 1830s, he had turned his attention to unique interpretations of historical genre painting, including fairy scenes, for example The Disenchantment of Bottom (1832). Another source of influence on Maclise's art came from the German Märchen painters Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld. This Germanic style can be seen in Maclise's early painting Faun and the Fairies, which also served as a wood‐engraved illustration to Edward Bulwer‐Lytton's Pilgrims on the Rhine (1834). Maclise returned to German‐derived ‘fairy’ subject‐matter in his Scene from Undine (1843), based upon a story by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. This painting was purchased by Queen Victoria as a birthday present for her husband Albert, the Prince Consort, signalling the royal support of certain kinds of fantasy painting and the affinity some of the British populace felt for German culture at this time.
Victorian fairy painting experienced its heyday during the 1840s. Its popularity arose partly out of the desire for new kinds of art by a growing middle‐class audience and partly because of the surreptitious restrictions gradually imposed on other painting genres in the Royal Academy. Fairy painting became a surrogate for certain subject‐matter, motifs, and themes unavailable or unacceptable in more élite categories of the academic hierarchy of painting. This genre crossed boundaries between the nude figure study, pastoral landscape, erotic mythological scenes, sentimental narrative, and literary history painting. Its success grew concurrently out of a confusion engendered by a crisis of identity about the nature of history painting within the Royal Academy itself. For the artist, critic, and art lover, this change emerged from the demands of a burgeoning middle‐class consumer culture for genre, landscape, and portrait painting, as well as a developing popular taste for a new kind of narrative painting. The cultural sense of an established artistic tradition, always shaky in the British arts, fell prey to the developing values of the middle class as they infiltrated in greater numbers the ranks of patronage, the academic organization, the art publication industry, and the critical press. At this critical juncture in early Victorian art history, fairy painters scored their greatest successes.
Both Richard Dadd and Joseph Noel Paton used fairy paintings as a way of garnering critical and popular attention in the 1840s. Dadd began to experience a gradual success with such works as Titania Sleeping (c.1841) and Come unto these Yellow Sands (1842). His descent into madness, culminating in the murder of his father, led to his incarceration in Bethlem Hospital and his removal from consideration (except as a curiosity) as a member of Victorian art circles. Noel Paton made a satisfying artistic debut with two fairy paintings, The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania (1847) and The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849). Planned as possible decorations for the Westminster Hall competitions, these pendant works led to the young artist's highly successful career as a painter of historical, allegorical, and religious scenes.
Even such established artists as William Etty (1787–1849), Joseph William Mallard Turner (1775–1851), and Edwin Landseer (1803–73) briefly explored fairy subject‐matter in the 1840s, taking advantage of the genre's popularity. Etty's The Fairy of the Fountain (1845) is a fairy painting in name only, while Turner's Queen Mab's Cave (1846) uses fairy subject‐matter as a peripheral element in what is essentially a landscape and colour study. Landseer, the youngest of the three, had already established his reputation as the best of the Victorian animal painters. His Scene from ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ (1849) was privately commissioned for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's dining‐room, which the famous engineer had planned to decorate with a Shakespearian gallery.
Early Victorian fairy painters relied not only upon the approval but also the recognition by their audience of their subject‐matter. The citation of fairy scenes in Shakespeare's plays brought a special kind of response, because the Victorian audience brought along certain expectations, derived from both their theatre experiences and their readings of Shakespeare, about what a fairy might look like or do. With the advent of Pre‐Raphaelitism, the problem of investing fantastic subject‐matter with some kind of verisimilitude takes on a new imperative.
The formation of the Pre‐Raphaelite Brotherhood grew out of a dissatisfaction on the part of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), and John Everett Millais (1829–96) with current academic practice and the perceived sterility of subject‐matter in contemporary Victorian art. The Brotherhood found some direction in their search for acceptable modern subjects in the technique of realism they found in their study of early Italian and Northern European painting before Raphael and in John Ruskin's first volume of Modern Painters (1843). At the same time, these young artists, despite their disaffection with the Royal Academy, felt a sympathy with the work of certain older artists working in the 1840s, including Ford Madox Brown, Maclise, and Paton, who anticipated the Brotherhood's interest in revitalizing history painting through complex narrative schemes and an accurate use of historical details.
One of Millais's early Pre‐Raphaelite paintings, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849), represents his adoption of the new naturalistic style and, concomitantly, testifies to the popularity of fairy painting at the end of the 1840s. Commissioned by the dealer William Wethered, this work evolved from two earlier versions by Millais on the same subject: a pen‐and‐ink drawing (1848) and a small oil sketch (1849–50). A dramatic change occurs in the final painting, which contains the highly saturated colours and the meticulously observed details of the nascent Pre‐Raphaelite style. Millais's desire to depict the surface detail of every form accurately leads to a flat cut‐out effect that emphasizes individual areas and creates a separation of one part from another. This effect can be seen most clearly in the awkward relationship of Ferdinand's head, modelled by F. G. Stephens, and his body, taken from Camille Bonnard's Costumes Historiques. Wethered refused to purchase the finished painting, either because of the unusual naturalism of the piece or because he was disappointed with the grotesquely rendered sprites. Millais never painted another fairy subject.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most romantic of the Pre‐Raphaelites, interpreted fairy themes in a wholly different way. He contributed an illustration to William Allingham's poetry collection The Music‐Master (1855), for the poem ‘The Maids of Elfin‐Mere’. The poem describes the encounter of a parson's son with the world of the supernatural in the form of three sisters, who appear magically every night to sing to the lad and then, at the stroke of the ‘Eleventh Hour’, disappear. His attraction proves so keen that he tries to keep them past their time on earth, unleashing a gruesome fate on the female trio. Rossetti concentrates on the eerie relationship between the crooning women and the spellbound man, and takes his image of the fairy from the medieval tradition of the fey sorceress, the femme fatale who enraptures men. He would continue this interest throughout his career in a series of sexually charged portraits of beatific, predatory, or victimized women. The popularity of Rossetti's imagery would sustain a wholly different kind of fantasy art in the symbolism and Art Nouveau of the 1890s.
William Bell Scott (1811–90) stays closer to the romantic tradition of the small cabinet picture in Cockcrow (1856), based upon Thomas Parnell's 18th‐century poem ‘A Fairy Tale, in the ancient English style’. Scotts pays homage to the work of his older brother David, who had established in the 1830s a pictorial imagery of a private visionary experience associated with fairy phenomena. The younger Scott grafts the brightly hued Pre‐Raphaelite style onto this more traditional visual conception of fairy behaviour. In melding fairy mythology to poetic vision, he chose a path more in tune with the direction of fairy painting after 1855.
This more intimate view of fairy life can also be found in the work of Frederick Goodall (1822–1904) and Robert Huskisson (1820–61). Goodall's Fairy Struck (c.1846) depicts the placid confrontation of two fairies with a mouse. The artist uses the transparency of watercolours to richly colourful effect, as the sunlight drenches the fairies' bower in a shimmering light. A more erotic mood inhabits Huskisson's The Midsummer Night's Fairies (c.1847), which shows Oberon watching a sleeping Titania as belligerent fairies war with fauna in the foreground. The frame makes reference to the human protagonists in the play; the figures of Bottom, Hermia, and Lysander slumber on a ledge beneath the fairy scene. Both artists examine the minutiae of fairy existence, providing the spectator with the experience of eavesdropping on the daily life of these tiny beings.
This voyeuristic element reappears in various guises in the work of John Anster Fitzgerald (1819–1906), John Simmons (1823–76), Thomas Heatherley (exhib. 1858–87), and John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–93). Fitzgerald created perhaps the most interesting variations on fairy themes with his small, brilliantly coloured oil paintings. For example, his series of works on the conflict between the fairy populace and Cock Robin mingles humanoid fairies and imaginative Boschian grotesques with carefully rendered birds, flowers, and insects. Fitzgerald's fairies, dressed in elaborate finery, possess a childlike bemusement as they move with tremulous bravado through a lush, exotic floral world. Simmons, Heatherley, and Grimshaw present a more forthright eroticism in their depictions of the sylvan creatures. Their paintings usually focus on a single nude female figure, framed by a natural setting and occasionally surrounded by the fairy court. In some of these works, the inclusion of a toadstool adds a phallic detail to the erotic subtext. These works have a dreamy cast to them as the fairies go about their business, unmindful of their human observers.
Interest in fairy subject‐matter did not die with the end of the Victorian era. Fairy paintings and illustrations appeared regularly in British exhibitions, magazines, and books well into the 20th century. Artists such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac revitalized the illustrative tradition with their conceptions of fairies as either fantastic grotesqueries or ethereal beauties. John Dixon Batten (1860–1932) and Henry Justice Ford (1860–1941) illustrated important fairy‐tale collections like those of Andrew Lang, carrying on the tradition of Pre‐Raphaelitism and the Aesthetic Movement. Fairies still proved popular in early 20th‐century children's book illustrations in the work of Florence Mary Anderson (fl. 1914–30), Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, and Jessie M. King (1876–1949). The post‐World War II era has also witnessed a growing revival of interest in fairy imagery. A painting by the British Pop artist Peter Blake, Titania (1978), for example, updates the canon with a depiction of the fairy queen as a barely pubescent young woman; the work makes an explicit association of women with nature and natural processes through the decoration of her breasts and genitalia with flowers, stems, and grass stalks.
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— Richard A. Schindler
