Victorian fairy painting
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The earliest artists considered to have contributed to the fairy painting 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. However, the artist most closely associated with fairy painting was outsider artist Richard Dadd, a suspected schizophrenic who produced most of his work while incarcerated in the Bethlem psychiatric hospital for the murder of his father. 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". 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.
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, in the form 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.
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. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another of the Brotherhood's initial members, took a more sensual approach to the subject, in both painting and poetry. 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".
