The Art Collective

A photo of collective member Carina Phillips working on a drawing with references to Victorian Fairy Paintings can be vewed in our Photo gallery. The piece, done at the Feb. 3, 2006, session, can be viewed by visiting the Our Work gallery.

Fairy paintings were the focus of a 1998 Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition. The work shown at the AGO was previously exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where it broke attendance records.

The Fairy Painting show, which travelled to the University of Iowa Museum of Art after its Toronto stop, is described in this excerpt from the University of Iowa's website:

Fairy painting was commercially and critically popular during the 19th century. It combined the Romantic interest in fantastic subject matter with the realistic techniques of Victorian painting. These qualities allowed fairy painting to bring together for the first time some of the most important concerns of 19th-century British art: the nude, the romantic landscape, the costume study, the sentimental narrative and imagery from literary, theatrical and historical sources.

Because it combines many of these elements on one canvas, fairy painting is a particularly incisive tool with which to address the nuances of the Victorian mindset. The exhibition will consider fairy painting in a historical as well as an aesthetic context. The impact of the IndustrialRevolution, Darwin's discoveries and other developments of 19th-century Britain will be examined, along with sexuality, religious dogma, nationalism and other social issues of the time.

Though fairy painting was primarily a Victorian achievement, the fascination with fairies and other mythical creatures is present throughout English literature. The paintings' story lines are frequently derived from the legends of the ancient Celts and Saxons. Victorian notions of fairies, however, were greatly inspired by characters in literary works derived from myth by Shakespeare, Pope, Spenser and others. Critics frequently name Shakespeare's Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Ariel in "The Tempest" as the quintessential fairy models.

The Victorian fascination with fairyland reflected a Shakespearean revival in the theater and the introduction of fairy themes into Romantic ballet. Plays and ballets at this time were enlivened by dramatic transformation scenes, actors "flew" on wires, and the introduction of limelight in 1826 made eerie lighting effects possible. One section of the exhibition will illustrate the development of such stage effects in theater, ballet and pantomime and will include designs for costumes and stage scenery.

The Victorian interest in the mythical world was also fueled by works in translation, including Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm's "German Popular Stories." The availability of such texts reflects the growth of a literate audience in the middle of the 19th century.

Though the popularity of fairy painting began to wane later in the century, advances in education and mass printing technology encouraged the adaptation of fairy subjects into printed media. Their appeal to children made illustrated fairy tales an ideal carrier of moral messages.

Fairy stories were also used in lavishly printed gift books into the 20th century. As with the empirical sciences, the advent of photography and its extreme realism may ultimately have led to a demand for more fantastic art.