Fairy painting fan, dated 1884, England, sig. Alice Morley, silk leaf, tortoiseshell sticks;
The fascination with the fairy world was a facet of Victorian romanticism and found expression in painting, book illustration, poetry, literature, ballet, music and theatre. It was a sign of Victorian romanticism and sentiment which was a counterpart to the strict Victorian moral values and social rules, poverty brought about by an dramatic increase in population, child labour, prostitution, social inequality, scientific developments and industrial revolution. The painter Edward Burne-Jones may have something when he says "The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels I shall paint". Country life and customs declined, too, due to the progress and work opportunities in the cities and exodus from the country. In 1878 the Folklore Society was founded to study and preserve local folklore and fairy tales associated with village and country life tradition. On the whole the Victorian age seems quite paradox, as it combined revolutionary ideas and inventions with repressive morality and strict social rules.
Fine Art fairy painting in England occured mainly between 1840-1870, but lived on until the early 20th century in book illustration, mainly in children's books.
Some of the major artists of the genre are Richard Dadd, Robert Huskisson, John Anster Fitzgerald and Joseph Noel Paton.
The painter Richard Dadd (1819-1886) has a suitably strange and dark romantic life history for the fairy painting genre.
Apart from his numerous other works he only painted about 10 fairy paintings, but especially the last two, which he painted after he "went mad", are considered the masterpieces of the genre Victorian Fairy Painting.
After a Grand Tour though Europe, the Middle East and Egypt Dadd began to have delusions. He returned to England in 1843 and, during a recuperation visit in the country, brutally murdered his father who he apparently believed to be the devil. Dadd spent the remainder of his life in mental institutions, but he was able and encouraged to continue painting and he created several watercolours and sketches of various themes.
The two fairy oil paintings "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" and "Contradiction: Oberon and Titania", though, which both took Dadd many years to paint, have a unique clarity, minuteness and hallucinatory atmosphere - a strange glimpse into the fairy world.
Richard Dadd even wrote a long verse with the title "Elimination of a Picture and its Subject" about his picture "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke", describing his work and explaining all the characters he painted. At Wikisource you can find his verse in full, here are some excerpts:
"Next to the Patriarch’s Crown attend. And mark the motes That there descend. Dancing and singing There they go – With their fall al The rah and huy gee wohe. The dress Is Spanish t’is in use, At present time If I abuse, not memory of the source From which I borrowedit them of course Call cossagers, no bloods are, these; As on a tight rope they to please. I represented – when in the play. One is Dressed like to Duvernay. Balancing These on the other side. Queen Mab In Car of state doth ride. Some Atomies the poet says did draw A gnat gives to them coachman’s law I never saw the famed Queen Mab Or might. Had it been so contributed Delight. The atomies are, no doubt, A dubious theme. Like tiny female Centaurs here do seem. Half beast & Half a woman yoked are. With wings To soar away in regions far. Under The coachman standing nigh. Two Little pages you may spy. Cupid & Psyche they enact. Fairies no doubt Possess the tact. To imitate like mortal Players. I know not if at theatres or Fairs. It needs must be so"
A copy of the original manuscript is to be found here.
Even William Turner and Sir Edwin Landseer produced fairy paintings, suited to the fairy craze of the Victorian period. Fairy painting was also used by some painters to explore immoral motifs under the cloak of Fine Art: nudity, heresy, drugs and violence. Christopher Woods describes the fairy nudes of John Simmons as "bunny girls of the Victorian era" in his book "Fairies in Victorian Art".
Later fairy painting occured in book illustrations during the so-called Golden Age of Book Illustration. This centered around children and children's stories like Peter Pan, Dew-drops of Fairyland, The reign of King Herla, Andrew Lang's Fairy Book series and The Water Babies.
Famous illustrators who worked with the fairy theme are Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, Margaret Tarrant, H.G. Ford and many others.
The fairy craze of the post-Victorian time even resulted in the "Cottingley Fairies affair", that involved the famous Sherlock-Holmes-author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1917 and 1918 two young girl cousins took photographs of themselves with fairies and goblins they had apparently met by a stream beyond the garden. Those photos and others they took later were subsequently publicised and examined by photographic experts as well as spiritualists. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a spiritualist himself, got very interested in the story. He was convinced that the sightings and photographs were genuine and in 1920 he wrote an article about it. Much later the photographs were pronounced to be fakes and the two girls, now in their seventies and eighties, gave conflicting statements about the fairy sightings and authenticity of the photographs.
Victorian fairy painting mainly has its background in literature: William Shakespeare (eg Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest), John Milton, Hans Christian Andersen, the brothers Grimm as well as traditional folklore have provided the basic ideas for motifs, decoration and scenes. Fairy painting can not really be called a "movement" of art, but it was a fashion during the Victorian period. Victorian fairy paintings were, however, special in the way that they did combine phantastic motifs with a naturalistic and realistic style of painting, which, according to Christopher Wood in his book "Victorian Fairy Painting", p. 11, gave them a "strange and, at times, disturbing intensity". After 1850 there was more independency of the literary inspiration to be found in fairy paintings, but it is very important to take into account and know fairy literature in order to understand the context and themes of Victorian fairy painting.
The scene on this fan is the classical fairy-ring motif: passers-by are lured into the dance ring.
Folktales say it is dangerous to enter a ring of dancing fairies as one can be caught forever in the fairy world. An old Welsh tale recounts the following: "The shepherd saw the fairies, in appearance like tiny soldiers, dancing in a ring. He set out for the scene of revelry, and soon drew near the ring where, in a gay company of males and females, they were footing it to the music of the harp. Never had he seen such handsome people, nor any so enchantingly cheerful. They beckoned him with laughing faces to join them as they leaned backward almost falling, whirling round and round with joined hands. Those who were dancing never swerved from the perfect circle; but some were clambering over the old cromlech, and others chasing each other with surprising swiftness and the greatest glee. Still others rode about on small white horses of the most beautiful form. All this was in silence, for the shepherd could not hear the harps, though he saw them. But now he drew nearer to the circle, and finally ventured to put his foot in the magic ring. The instant he did this, his ears were charmed with strains of the most melodious music he had ever heard...".
Another fan with a fairy motif that, however, uses the fairy theme purely for decorative reasons, is the Rowley fan. Hugh Rowley, of 6 Silwood Road, Brighton (18th June 1833 - 12th May 1908), was active as a fan painter between 1875 and 1895. He often collaborated with his second wife Caroline when painting fans. There is no evidence of his being active in fan painting before his second marriage (January 1874). He was the grandson of the 1st Baron Langford. [Information on Hugh Rowley supplied by Anthony Bernard Levy and Helene Alexander, FCI Bulletin]
You can see some small elves with red caps amidst the flowers:
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