The fascination with fairies and their folkloric tales has a long and rich history, particularly in Great Britain.
During the Victorian era, fairy pictures became an art genre all their own. Much of this fairy enthrallment, which began in the mid-19th century, was fueled by societal changes. In the face of scientific advancements and industrialization, people’s interest in a spirit world, in addition to the natural world, increased.
Source material for these paintings, illustrations, and watercolors came from Celtic legends, a revived interest in medieval romances, and from plays by England’s most famous literary son, William Shakespeare, especially “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Professional performances of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” were incredibly popular in 19th-century England. One of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, it is a multilayered examination on themes of love, marriage, order, disorder, appearance, and reality. In the story, four young Athenians—Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena—run away to a forest in the midst of wedding preparations for the Duke of Athens.While in the woodland, their paths cross with fairyland. Oberon, who is King of the Fairies, and his queen, Titania, have arrived with their retinue for the wedding. The royals quarrel, and Oberon’s fairy servant, Puck, is instructed to play a magical trick on Titania. A case of mistaken identity inadvertently draws the Athenian humans into the plot. By the end of the story, the magic is reversed and all couples reconcile.
In the latter part of his career, the artist John Simmons (1823–76), who was known for portraiture, created a series of works inspired by Shakespeare’s play. These stand out among other “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” artworks due to their juxtaposition of highly detailed realism and imaginative features.
In his watercolor “Hermia and Lysander, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” the fleeing forbidden lovers are depicted as being lost in the woods, corresponding with the play’s Act 2, scene 2. It is night and they decide to go to sleep, unaware of the fairies and other enchanted creatures lurking around them. Lysander takes Hermia’s finger with one hand, and with his other he touches the forest floor’s moss.
In the play, he romantically declares: “One turf shall serve as pillow for us both;/ One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth.” Later in the play, when Lysander wakes, he falls in love with Hermia’s friend, Helena, as a result of Puck’s mischievous intervention. Simmons hints that Helena may already be on the scene, represented as the shadowy figure in the distance at Hermia’s right. Puck may be among the fairies at the couple’s feet or the barely visible figure at center left.
“Hermia and Lysander, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’” is ripe with diverse and realistically detailed representations of fairies, which reflects the artist’s background in miniature painting.
The work came up for auction in 2012, and the Sotheby’s catalog comments that “Simmons creates an entire civilization of varying ’species’ of fairies: some fly with fluttering, gossamer wings, and others ride mice-driven chariots or leathery bats, with pale, attenuated bodies gleaming in the moonlight.” The catalog observes that the reward for carefully viewing these meticulously rendered minute details is akin to that of looking through a microscope. This is an apt analogy as there were Victorians who believed that fairies were real and who went on “scientific expeditions” to gather evidence.
‘Spirit of Night’
A number of great Victorian fairy paintings drew inspiration from sources other than Shakespeare’s play. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–93) produced only a few fairy canvases, and they were primarily a vehicle for his lifelong study of the effects of light. “Spirit of Night” is a prime example of his interest in iridescence, which he explored through experimentations with prisms and their colored light.
In this painting, the fairy who was modeled by the actress Agnes Leefe, who posed for many of the artist’s works, wears a transparent veil. A Christie’s 2019 sale catalog description for this painting states that the fairy “hovers above a village by the sea under a moonlit sky, the silvery light reflecting off the sea, her translucent skin and shimmers in all the colors of the rainbow on her opalescent wings.” It is the hazy, autumnal colored village that seems unreal, while the outlined fairy has a weighty presence despite her airy flight.
Wrap thy form in mantle gray Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out. Then wonder o’er city and sea and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand— Come, long-sought!
Supernatural Portraits
The color green has long been associated with attributions both positive (such as spring, forest, good luck, health) and negative (including snakes, poison, dragons, evil), according to Inezita Gay-Eckel in the L’École webinar. Medieval historian Michel Pastoureau, in his book “Green: The History of a Color,” writes that green has long been the color of supernatural beings, especially fairies. This symbolic colorization can be traced as far back as illuminated manuscripts.
Green is used to striking effect in Sophie Gengembre Anderson’s “Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things.” Anderson (1823–1903) specialized in charming and tender portraits of children, particularly girls. The sentimental exploration of childhood in art became popular in the Victorian era. Occasionally, the artist painted girls in the guise of fairies, of which this painting is a stunning example.
The girl is depicted with a vibrantly colored butterfly crown and fairy wings. Ms. Icart, in the L’Ecole webinar, describes the girl/fairy as looking like a Celtic princess with her red hair, fair skin, and crown. The green pouch that she clasps, decorated with a golden lattice and pearls, may hold her jewelry; another theory is that its green color indicates it could contain a magic potion. Still, with her angelic face, it seems likely that she is a “good fairy,” suggesting the potion is not a poison.
In Christopher Wood’s “Fairies in Victorian Art,” the definitive book on this subject, Wood writes: “The Victorians desperately wanted to believe in fairies, because they represented one of the ways they could escape the intolerable reality of living in an unromantic, materialistic and scientific age.”
Viewing these creative, artistically skilled, and mesmerizing fairy images, one is transported from the mundane world into the romantic atmosphere of the supernatural. Continuing to weave their enchanting spell even in modern times, these Victorian pictures have been brought to a new generation’s attention through books, exhibitions, and auction sales.
