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Lot Essay
Victorian Fairy Painting was a phenomenon suited to its time. From the whimsical to the macabre, the 19th century public evinced a great appetite for make-believe. Building upon their Gothic inheritance, mid- 19th Century artists such as John Anster Fitzgerald and Robert Huskisson introduced a creed of naturalism which became key to the Victorian interpretation of this aesthetic. With Ruskinian precision, a goblin is as meticulously rendered as a butterfly, and the familiar is placed next to the extraordinary.
Etheline E. Dell is not the most famous of Victorian fairy painters, but she is one of the most interesting. An illustrator and genre painter, based in New Malden, Surrey, she worked in oil and watercolour. Her fairies are immediately recognisable: strange and luminous beings, often unclothed, of benign and dreamy aspect.
Titania's moonlit bower appears to be a generic image inspired by Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, rather than an evocation of a particular scene. In Scene II, Act I, a fairy describes how she attends upon Oberon's queen:
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl behind each cowslip's ear.
Later, Titania summons Bottom to her bower, and proclaims:
The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Dell's painting suggests attention to the text; her fairies lie langorously or sit huddled together, in conversation or deep in thought. Their postures are natural rather than theatrical. Some are adorned with tiny flashing coronets, which catch the moonlight and echo the glassy dewdrops scattering the woodland floor and illuminating the foliage.
Another subject from the play, Midsummer Fairies, a watercolour, was offered at Christie's on 10 March 1995 (lot 109). The image showed Titania in the centre foreground, and was surounded by a proscenium arch.
Etheline E. Dell is not the most famous of Victorian fairy painters, but she is one of the most interesting. An illustrator and genre painter, based in New Malden, Surrey, she worked in oil and watercolour. Her fairies are immediately recognisable: strange and luminous beings, often unclothed, of benign and dreamy aspect.
Titania's moonlit bower appears to be a generic image inspired by Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, rather than an evocation of a particular scene. In Scene II, Act I, a fairy describes how she attends upon Oberon's queen:
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl behind each cowslip's ear.
Later, Titania summons Bottom to her bower, and proclaims:
The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Dell's painting suggests attention to the text; her fairies lie langorously or sit huddled together, in conversation or deep in thought. Their postures are natural rather than theatrical. Some are adorned with tiny flashing coronets, which catch the moonlight and echo the glassy dewdrops scattering the woodland floor and illuminating the foliage.
Another subject from the play, Midsummer Fairies, a watercolour, was offered at Christie's on 10 March 1995 (lot 109). The image showed Titania in the centre foreground, and was surounded by a proscenium arch.