Fairy painting is a genre of paintings and illustrations featuring fairy and fairy tales, often with extreme attention to detail. The genre is most closely related to the Victorian era in Great Britain, but has undergone a contemporary revival. In addition, fairy paintings are also seen as an escape for Victorian citizens.
Video Fairy painting
Origin and influence
Despite its strange appearance, fairy paintings are deeply rooted in the literary and theatrical influences of Romanticism, as well as in the cultural problems facing the Victorian era. Among the most significant of these influences are Shakespeare's fantasy themes A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Other literary works, such as Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene and Alexander Pope's mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock have been cited as contributing influences as well. Innovation in the production phase helps bring these works to the public eye, because the development of gaslight and improvement in cable work leads to more and more special effects. Although once described by Douglas Jerrold as a "fairy creation that can only be acted upon by fairies", the production of Midsummer Night's Dream became more common, eventually leading to a spectacle of 1863 featuring Ellen Terry as a Titania astride mechanical mushrooms.
Cultural change is also an important factor during this period. Ongoing industrialization has deprived old traditions, and rapid advances in science and technology, especially the invention of photography, make some people feel uncomfortable and confused. According to Jeremy Maas, the transition to elements of mythology and fantasy, and especially to the fairy world, enables the escape of these demands. "No other type of painting concentrates so much from the opposite elements of the Victorian soul: the desire to escape the grim hardships of everyday life, stirring up new attitudes toward sex, paralyzed by religious dogma, the passion for which invisible, the birth of psychoanalysis, the latent hatred of the precision of newly invented photography. "The importance of fairy painting as a reaction to cultural change is not universally accepted. "In the end," Andrew Stuttaford wrote, "these paintings are just about having fun."
Maps Fairy painting
Victorian fairy painting
The earliest artists are thought to have contributed to the genre of predating much of the Romanticism and Victorian era. Henry Fuseli and William Blake produced works that would be indicative of the next genre even before 1800. However, the artist most closely associated with the fairy paintings is the outsider Richard Dadd, a schizophrenic suspect who produced most of his work while imprisoned in the abominable abominations of Bethlem house sick for the murder of his father. Regardless of its status and condition, its fantastic subject and superbly detailed styles are generally well received, with one period reviewers describing his work as "very ideal". He accompanied his work, the Master-Stroke The Fairy Feller, with an elaborate poem that provided the historical, literary, or mythological context for each of the characters depicted.
However, fairy painting is not merely the realm of art outside. John Anster Fitzgerald's work debuted at London's Royal Academy. His work, in the form of a series of Christmas-themed fairy illustrations, received wider public visibility in Illustrated London News. Scottish artist Joseph Noel Paton showcased two very detailed paintings, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania
The genre also affects the Pre-Raphael Brotherhood and the movement that begins. Co-founder John Everett Millais produced a series of fairy paintings based on The Tempest , ending in 1849 with Ferdinand Lured by Ariel . Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the early members of the Brotherhood, takes a more sensual approach to the subject, both in painting and poetry. Others involved with this movement, such as Arthur Hughes and William Bell Scott, also contributed to the genre.
Although the Cottingley fairy briefly revived interest in the subjects, the decline of romance and the emergence of World War I reduced interest in popular styles and topics during the Victorian era. Arthur Rackham's fairy tale books are considered "the last flowering".
Modern revival
Interest in fantasy and literary art since the 1970s has seen a resurgence in the topics and styles of Victorian fairy painting, often in a new context. While artists such as Stephanie Pui-Mun Law have produced genre illustrations for book covers and role-playing, the work of Brian Froud, also known as a series of fairy illustrated books, has been adapted into several successful films including The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth . A 2003 book, The Art of Faery, written by David Riche and mentored by Froud, contributed to the careers of twenty fairy artists of this revival movement, including Amy Brown, Myrea Pettit, Jasmine Becket-Griffith, Philippe Fernandez, James Browne, and Jessica Galbreth, many of whom went on to the authors of individual art books. The fae depiction has entered into popular culture in other ways as well, including clothing design, ceramics, sculpture, needlecraft, figurative art, quilting, many of which are marketed via Hot Topic to the international online market. Part of the growing popularity over the last three decades is due to the New Age Movement. The Renaissance fair and the science fiction convention have also developed the modern fairy art as a collection genre.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia