Titania

A Bristol portrait painter and miniaturist, Simmons turned to fairy painting in the 1860s as it became an increasingly popular genre, springing both from the constant search for narrative subject matter, but also from a desire to escape the mundanity of everyday Victorian life. The works of Shakespeare provided the richest source of fairy subject-matter, and almost all of Simmons' fairy paintings take Titania as their subject, treating her as 'a paragon of Victorian maidenhood' (J. Maas cited in J. Martineau (ed.), Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1998, p. 21). Here, she is depicted nude, draped in diaphanous robes, framed by lily of the valley, signifying a return of happiness in the Victorian language of flowers. The extraordinary intensity and luminosity of Simmons' watercolours, alongside the highly detailed flora and fauna, give them an almost hallucinatory atmosphere, drawing the viewer into his fantastical world.