Fairy painting

Fairy painting is a genre of painting and illustration featuring fairies and fairy tale settings, often with extreme attention to detail. The genre is most closely associated with the Victorian era in Great Britain, but has experienced a contemporary revival. Moreover, fairy painting was also seen as escapism for Victorians.

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.