Feywatch

The Frick Collection, New York City: Victorian Fairy Painting 

National Review, December 21, 1998

Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (Detail)

CONFOUND Victoria, and the slimy inhibitions/She loosed on all us Anglo-Saxon creatures!" That was what the New England poetess Amy Lowell thought back in the 1920s. To judge by a fascinating exhibition (and the response to it) currently on view at New York's Frick Collection, hers is an opinion still with us today. For the Victorian era is the foundation of our town, and, as such, it has now become yet another battleground in the culture wars. Bring the Victorians down to our level, and we can reassure ourselves that our shambles of a society is really not that bad.

The exhibition is called "Victorian Fairy Painting" and it is dedicated to our tiny fluttering friends. The little people hover, frolic, and entice in canvas after canvas, along with a supporting cast of goblins, elves, and imps.

John Anster Fitzgerald: The Captive Robin

Strange to us, yes, but in their mid-Victorian heyday, these pictures were popular, in tune with their era. According to reviews of this show, they are also in tune with our own age. Writing in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl notes that "this stuff. . . feels right on time for us." Leslie Camhi at the Village Voice likewise uses the fairies to admit the Victorians to our own idiot carnival. Both periods, apparently, have "seen the revival of druidism, crystal worship, and a host of ancient spiritual practices."

So were the Victorians old-time New Agers? Writing In New York magazine, Mark Stevens claims that the Victorian interest in the occult "honored what could not be explained or ruled." I doubt it. The New Age rejection of the scientific method would have appalled a nineteenth-century culture obsessed with the search for explanations and rules. With their relatively primitive science, the Victorians may have come to some loopy conclusions, but they were at least trying to get at the truth.

Yes, that's right, the truth. Unlike many of us post-moderns, the Victorians believed in an objective truth. But not, for the most part, in fairies. Even in art. To get the supposed pixiemania in proportion, take a glance, for instance, at the leading paintings of the 1846 Royal Academy Exhibition. They're a down-to-earth lot, far from any enchanted glades. Highlights include Mulready's Choosing the Wedding gown, four animal pictures by Landseer, and Redgrave's thrilling Sunday Morning—The Walk from Church.

It is no coincidence that a number of the most striking works on display at the Frick are by painters who were outsiders. The greatest of them all, Richard Dadd, murdered his father. His obsessively detailed masterpiece. The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, was the product of nine years' work in a lunatic asylum. That's also where Charles Doyle (father of the creator of Sherlock Holmes) ended up. His Self Portrait, A Meditation, shows a man all too aware that the spirits surrounding him are the product of a troubled mind.

Chatles Doyle: Self-Portrait, A Meditation

And they were certainly nothing to do with pollution. In a Sierra Club twitch, the Frick tries to explain the fairy paintings as "an escape from the grim elements of an industrial society." Not really. Arcadian fantasy had been around long before the factories of Victorian England. It is a nice irony, however, that the great engineer lsambard Kingdom Brunel was the man responsible for commissioning the only fairy painting by Queen Victoria's favorite artist, Edwin Landseer. Actually, be wanted a Shakespearean theme for his dining room. What he got was A Midsummer Night's Dream, featuring a sultry Titania, and Bottom, of course.

Sir Edwin Landseer: Scene From 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

In fact, quite a number of bottoms. Offbeat nudity was a good part of this genre's appeal—both at the time and to later critics eager to show that the nasty Victorians were both repressed and (bonus!) perverse. To Mr. Schjeldahl these paintings exemplify "Anglo-sexual hysteria." More cautiously, the Frick's own introduction to the show refers to an "indulgence of new attitudes towards sex." "Hysteria," a "new attitude"? Nudie pics were popular long before the appearance of the fey babes now tumbling along the walls of the Frick.

Tumbling, one must admit, in a way not normally associated with Victorian Britain. Yet this was a Britain where John Simmons's Titania, a lissome blonde vaguely draped in the most diaphanous of robes, could be displayed without scandal. For that, thank the butterfly wings sprouting from the fairy queen's shoulders. They took Titania out of the real world and transformed her into something too ethereal for the grubby business of sex. To Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, all this is "a form of collective sexual denial that is a root of the phrase 'there'll always be in England."

John Simmons: Titania

Oh, come on (full disclosure: I'm English). Foxy fairies were just an update of an old trick. Earlier artists had used "classical" themes (a "Venus" here, a "Sabine Woman" there) in much the same way. Ultimately, these paintings were just about fun. As Charles Dickens understood, "Fairy tales should he respected. … A nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun." Sentimental and coy they may have been, but to most of their fans, the fairies were just otherworldly entertainment, a very small part of a very rich culture, little more than the science fiction of an era when imagination was lagging behind technology.

If we try to project out own obsessions onto them, it is we, not the Victorians, who are in Never-Never Land.

Joseph Noel Paton: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (detail)