The Fairies' Favourite

Expand

IIIFView PDF

The Fairies' Favourite

Artist John Anster Fitzgerald British, 1823-1906

Dateca. 1860-1865

Dimensions9 1/2 × 13 3/4 in. (24.1 × 34.9 cm)

MediumWatercolor and body color heightened with white on paper

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of The Georgia Welles Apollo Society

Object number

2018.32

Not on View

Label TextThe “Golden Age” of Victorian fairy painting spanned the decades from 1840 to 1870, and John Anster Fitzgerald—Fairy Fitzgerald, as he was known—was perhaps the genre’s greatest protagonist. Most fairy painters derived their subjects from literary sources, in particular Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, but Fitzgerald’s compositions most often are his own inventions. The hallucinatory character of his works suggests not only the potential influence of the imagery of the 16th-century Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch, but also the possible effects of experimentation with opium. The Fairies’ Favourite includes more than two dozen fantastically attired denizens of the fairy kingdom lurking in a lush vegetal world. Fitzgerald organizes the scene around a central motif, seen below a prominent blue morning glory: a floral-tethered, captive bird is presented with a cherry and berries on leaf platters. This and other such Fitzgerald compositions of birds and imaginary creatures, often having a threatening and even sinister aspect, ultimately derive from the English nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin?, which was enacted in pantomime on the London stage during the artist’s day.