Fairy Painting - Origins and Influences

Origins and Influences

Despite its whimsical appearance, fairy painting is strongly rooted in the literary and theatrical influences of Romanticism, as well as in the cultural issues facing the Victorian era. Among the most significant of these influences were the fantasy themes of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Other literary works, such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Alexander Pope's mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock have been cited as contributing influences as well. Innovations in stage production helped bring these works to the public eye, as the development of gaslight and improvements in wire-work led to increasingly elaborate special effects. Although once described by Douglas Jerrold as "a fairy creation that could only be acted by fairies", productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream became more common, eventually leading to an 1863 spectacle featuring Ellen Terry as Titania astride a mechanical mushroom.

Cultural changes were also an important factor during this period. Continuing industrialization was uprooting longstanding traditions, and rapid advances in science and technology, especially the invention of photography, left some people discomforted and confused. According to Jeremy Maas, the turn to mythological and fantasy elements, and in particular to the fairy's world, allowed an escape from these demands. "No other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements of the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the drear hardships of daily existence; the stirrings of new attitudes toward sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; the birth of psychoanalysis; the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography." The significance of fairy paintings as a reaction to cultural change is not universally accepted, however. "Ultimately," Andrew Stuttaford wrote, "these paintings were just about fun."