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拍品專文
‘'Fairy Fitzgerald'...was an artist who will probably be more appreciated in time to come than he is in his own lifetime’, wrote Aaron Watson in The Savage Club, 1907 (from J. Maas, Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1997, p. 17). Today, Watson's prediction has proved true as John Anster Fitzgerald is widely recognised for his whimsical paintings of fairy banquets, dances and funerals.
A uniquely British tradition, fairy painting began in the late eighteenth century with artists like William Blake and Henry Fuseli who imaginatively illustrated the work of Shakespeare, particularly his more fanciful plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. However, it was in the Victorian era that fairies really seized the popular imagination influencing artistic, theatrical and literary culture. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) the heroine 'busies herself in sketching fancy vignettes', including one of 'an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom'.
Alongside contemporaries such as Richard Dadd and Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle, John Anster Fitzgerald departed from the literary tradition and instead created his own genre of fairy painting based on folklore and legends. Among Fitzgerald's influences were the writings of Thomas Crofton Croker and Thomas Keightley which retold the oral and supposedly documentary accounts of, among other subjects, fairy funerals. A popular subject at the time, fairy funerals seem to have occupied the thoughts of not only Croker, Keightley and Fitzgerald, but Blake as well, who purported to have witnessed one in his own garden (C. Gere, 'In Fairy Land', Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1997, p. 63).
Often featuring birds and small animals, as well as fantastically attired denizens of the fairy kingdom, they have a hallucinatory quality, as if they were the products of drug induced dreams. Sometimes the sleepers are actually shown, surrounded by the phantasmagoria of their lulled but teeming brains. The strangeness of Fitzgerald's scenes may also derive from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, which the British artist may likely have seen from prints (Maas, op. cit., p. 18), and transformed from nightmarish images into charming vignettes of fantastical whimsy.
The Fairy Bower draws inspiration from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the fairy king and queen lying asleep beneath a holly bush under the watch of various imps and sprites as well as a number of small mice and birds. The vibrant, jewel-like colours and the picture’s combination of tender beauty laced with an undercurrent of mischief are typical of Fitzgerald’s work. The painting is presented in a striking twig frame which adds to the air of fantasy. Interestingly this method of presentation was not original to the artist but inspired by the dealer Jeremy Maas who did much to reignite the interest in Victorian fairy painting and who chose to represent Fitzgerald’s Fairies in a Bird’s Nest (fig. 1) in a twig frame.
A uniquely British tradition, fairy painting began in the late eighteenth century with artists like William Blake and Henry Fuseli who imaginatively illustrated the work of Shakespeare, particularly his more fanciful plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. However, it was in the Victorian era that fairies really seized the popular imagination influencing artistic, theatrical and literary culture. In Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) the heroine 'busies herself in sketching fancy vignettes', including one of 'an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom'.
Alongside contemporaries such as Richard Dadd and Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle, John Anster Fitzgerald departed from the literary tradition and instead created his own genre of fairy painting based on folklore and legends. Among Fitzgerald's influences were the writings of Thomas Crofton Croker and Thomas Keightley which retold the oral and supposedly documentary accounts of, among other subjects, fairy funerals. A popular subject at the time, fairy funerals seem to have occupied the thoughts of not only Croker, Keightley and Fitzgerald, but Blake as well, who purported to have witnessed one in his own garden (C. Gere, 'In Fairy Land', Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1997, p. 63).
Often featuring birds and small animals, as well as fantastically attired denizens of the fairy kingdom, they have a hallucinatory quality, as if they were the products of drug induced dreams. Sometimes the sleepers are actually shown, surrounded by the phantasmagoria of their lulled but teeming brains. The strangeness of Fitzgerald's scenes may also derive from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, which the British artist may likely have seen from prints (Maas, op. cit., p. 18), and transformed from nightmarish images into charming vignettes of fantastical whimsy.
The Fairy Bower draws inspiration from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the fairy king and queen lying asleep beneath a holly bush under the watch of various imps and sprites as well as a number of small mice and birds. The vibrant, jewel-like colours and the picture’s combination of tender beauty laced with an undercurrent of mischief are typical of Fitzgerald’s work. The painting is presented in a striking twig frame which adds to the air of fantasy. Interestingly this method of presentation was not original to the artist but inspired by the dealer Jeremy Maas who did much to reignite the interest in Victorian fairy painting and who chose to represent Fitzgerald’s Fairies in a Bird’s Nest (fig. 1) in a twig frame.