Apart from his numerous other works he only painted about 10 fairy paintings, but especially the last two, which he painted after he "went mad", rank as the masterpieces of the genre.
After a Grand Tour through Europe, the Middle East and Egypt he began to have delusions. He returned to England in 1843 and, during a recuperation visit in the country, brutally murdered his father who he believed was the devil. He spent the remainder of his life in mental institutions, but was able and encouraged to go on painting and created several watercolours and sketches of various themes.
The two fairy oil paintings "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" and "Contradiction: Oberon and Titania", though, which both took several years to paint, are remarkable for their clarity, minuteness and hallucinatory atmosphere - a strange glimpse into the fairy world.
1854-58; Oil on canvas
This painting was painted during his years in Bethlem Hospital while he was suffering from schizophrenia. It was painted after he had been staying there for ten years. However, this painting does tie into his earlier work because once again it has for its subject Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This painting depicts the scene of Oberon and Titania arguing over an Indian boy in Act II, Scene I. This painting is different from his earlier works because every piece of space in the painting is covered with miniscule fairies dancing and plants. The details are extreme he spent years obsessively working on this painting. At the bottom of the painting beneath Oberon and Titania, there appears a blue butterfly and to the left of it, a tiny fairy flying, above it are even more miniature fairies which are difficult to see in this picture. He painted this painting for his doctor, Dr. William Charles Hood, who was enlightened for the time and encouraged his painting. This painting was never viewed by the public until 1930. After this painting and his other master piece, The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke were viewed he was to be declared the greatest Victorian Fairy painter.
William Turner and Sir Edwin Landseer produced fairy paintings, suited to the fairy craze of the Victorian period. Fairy painting was also used by some painters to explore immoral motifs under the cloak of Fine At: nudity, heresy, drugs and violence. Christopher Woods describes the fairy nudes of John Simmons as "bunny girls of the Victorian era" in his book "Fairies in Victorian Art".
John Simmons (1823-1876), "Titania"
Later fairy painting lived on in book illustrations during the so-called Golden Age of Book Illustration. This centered around children and children's stories like Peter Pan, Dew-drops of Fairyland, The reign of King Herla, Andrew Lang's Fairy Book series and The Water Babies. Famous illustrators who worked with the fairy theme are Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Warwick Goble, Kay Nielsen, Margaret Tarrant, H.G. Ford and many others.The fairy craze of the post-Victorian time even resulted in the "Cottingley Fairies affair", that involved as famous an author as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1917 and 1918 two young girl cousins took photographs of themselves with fairies and goblins they had apparently met by a stream beyond the garden. Those photos and others they took later were subsequently publicised and examined by photographic experts as well as spiritualists. Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a spiritualist himself, got very interested in the story. He was convinced that the sightings and photographs were genuine and in 1920 he wrote an article about it. Much later the photographs were pronounced to be fakes and the two girls, now in their seventies and eighties, gave conflicting statements about the fairy sightings and photographs.
Victorian fairy painting mainly has its background in literature: William Shakespeare (eg Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest), John Milton, Hans Christian Andersen, the brothers Grimm as well as traditional folklore have provided the basis for motifs, decoration and scenes. It can not really be called a "movement" of art, but was a distinct streak during the Victorian period. Victorian fairy paintings were, however, special in the way that they did combine phantastic motifs with a naturalistic and realistic style of painting, which, according to Christopher Wood in his book "Victorian Fairy Painting", p. 11, gave them a "strange and, at times, disturbing intensity". After 1850 there was more independency of the literary inspiration to be found in fairy paintings, but it is important to take into account fairy literature in order to understand the context of Victorian fairy painting.
