John Anster Fitzgerald 1832-1906

Sotheby's, Belgravia, 15th February 1983, lot 76a, bought by Jeremy Maas;

Private collection

London, British Institution, 1857, no. 389;

London, Anthony d’Offay Fine Art, Dream and Fantasy in English Painting, 1978, no. 7;

Royal Academy of Art, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Victorian Fairy Painting, 1997-1898, no.36;

Jeremy Maas, Victorian Painters, 1969, p.155;

Jeremy Maas, Pamela White Trimpe, Charlotte Gere and others, Victorian Fairy Painting, catalogue for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1997, p. 115, illus. p.114;

Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, 2000, p.102-103, illus. p. 99;

‘He was a picturesque old chap… He had a mobile face, a twinkling eye, and his hair was long, thick and thrown back from his face… He was known as ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ from the fact that his work, both colour and black-and-white, was devoted to fairy scenes, in fact his life was one long Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ (Harry Furniss, My Bohemian Days, 1919)

John Anster Fitzgerald’s paintings are arguably the most charming and mystical of all the fairy painters’ productions, The Artist’s Dream among only a handful of his more ambitious works. ‘Fitzgerald’s pictures of sleeping figures and their dreams are his most remarkable contribution to fairy painting.’ (Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, 2000, pg. 98). The Artist’s Dream was one of the first, and the most revealing of this series.

Composed like an unfolding dream in which fantasy is superimposed over ‘reality’, the painting has a supernatural enchantment almost Gothic in its oddity and unlike anything that had been painted in Britain since Henri Fuseli. A weary artist, his sleeves still rolled up from his labours, is slumped exhausted in a carved oak chair, his head supported by a red damask cushion. He has turned his chair so that he need no longer look at the portrait of an old lady that he has tired himself sketching on a murky canvas. As he sleeps, he dreams of his desire to paint a beautiful young fairy-queen whilst her wispy weird attendants garland him with laurels (symbolic of the fame he craves) and fill his pockets with gold coins (symbolic of the wealth he craves). The figure of the artist is a self-portrait and the subject of the painting is a biography of Fitzgerald, who made his living as a portrait painter, but wished he could devote himself to painting fairy pictures. The fairy model turns from the figure of the artist in the visioned dream to the figure of the artist sleeping, reinforcing the suggestion that the fairy-folk hover between the two worlds. When The Artist’s Dream was exhibited at the British Institution in 1857 it was given the title The Dream; Begot of Nothing but Vain Fantasy Which is as Thin of Substance as the Air, revealing Fitzgerald’s regret that dreams do not always come true.

The Artist’s Dream was the first of a series of pictures by Fitzgerald that deal with the subject of dreams, several of them suggestive of opiate hallucination. The goblins, half-transparent in their ghostly dance, are wide eyed scampering beasties casting spells and rushing about with impish abandon. One of them carries a crystal vessel, which suggests that the dream has been stimulated by the consumption of some sort of intoxicating substance. The white cloud in which the dream appears is reminiscent of a cloud of opium smoke, whilst the fairies appear to be formed from the stray wisps of smoke issuing from an invisible hookah. It is not known whether Fitzgerald indulged in drug taking, but there was certainly plenty of it about and opium did not have quite the same connotations as it does today. Morphine, cocaine and chloroform all came onto the market in the Victorian period and it was not immediately recognised that their consumption was harmful. Not until the 1880s were the dangers of drug abuse widely known. In 1860 at the height of the popularity of narcotics a highly popular book entitled The Seven Sisters of Sleep, extolled the virtues of hashish, tobacco, opium, magic mushrooms and cocaine in an allegorical tale of a fairy-queen. Opium was the recreational drug of the artistic and poetic and many great Victorian works of literature were produced under its influence, from Oscar Wilde ’s Salome to Rossetti’s images of femme fatales.

In 1821 Thomas De Quincey had published Confessions of an English Opium Eater to great popularity and other literary disciples of opium include Edward Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Sir Walter Scott. Wilkie Collins took a little too much one evening to aid his writing through the night, and was astonished to find another Wilkie Collins seated beside him attempting to complete his work for him. Perhaps The Artist’s Dream depicts a similar hallucination that Fitzgerald actually believed he had seen. As Christopher Wood has noted, ‘More than any of his contemporaries, Fitzgerald succeeds in depicting on canvas the deeper and darker recesses of the Victorian subconscious’ (Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, 2000, pg. 98).

The Artist’s Dream is the only ‘dream picture’ to depict a male figure, in all the others the principal figure is female. A similar composition is the watercolour The Nightmare which was probably painted around the same time and depicts a young lady in the throws of a menacing dream, writhing on a bed whilst imps and monsters scamper around her bedchamber. An earlier composition, entitled The Captive Dreamer of 1856 (Peter Nahum) depicted an outdoor female sleeper, in the heart of an enchanted forest, chained to a tree and reclining on a goggle-eyed monster. The closest comparison can be drawn between The Artist’s Dream and The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of (two versions, both in private collections) in which a maiden dreams that she is united with a handsome lover whilst amicable mischievous creatures celebrate her romance with dancing and music making. The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of was painted a year after The Artist’s Dream and the earlier version has the same dimensions. It is likely that the pictures were conceived as a pendants. In some respects The Artist’s Dream depicts a more forceful and potent image of enchantment and hallucination as the figure is an artist rather than a pretty young women. Although the paintings in which a maiden is the principal figure are very beautiful, the reclining female figures surrounded by fairies and elves are more conventional and recall images of Titania sleeping among her entourage.

‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ as he was known, was set apart from the other fairy painters, as he did not rely upon using literary connections to excuse his foray into the fairy world. Unlike Huskisson, Paton and Dadd, Fitzgerald’s fairies are not characters from Shakespeare’s Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or allegories of sin. Fitzgerald’s fairies are as supernatural and imagined as Hieronymus Bosch’s whose magical monsters bear more than a passing resemblance in both their anatomy and mischievous temperament.

John Anster Fitzgerald was an Irishman by birth, the third son of the actor William Thomas Fitzgerald, mocked by Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, thus ‘Let hoarse Fitzgerald bawl; His creaking couplets in a tavern hall’. It is likely that his father’s connections with the theatre lead to his interest in fairy subjects through the productions Shakespeare’s fairy plays. Fitzgerald furthered his interest in such subjects through his illustrations for The Illustrated London News, which often depicted pantomime scenes.

Details of Fitzgerald’s training as a painter are not known and it is likely that he was self-taught. However, by the 1840s he was exhibiting at the British Institution, the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Artists. His oeuvre was not limited to fairy paintings and among the exhibits he showed over his fifty-year career, were landscapes, historical scenes and portraits. However his best-known and most successful work by far, are the series of fairy pictures produced during the 1850s and 1860s. Unlike the other, more conventional subject pictures, his fairy works were highly imaginative, glorious in colour and shimmering with magical poetry. It is these qualities which have made Fitzgerald the most celebrated of all the Victorian fairy painters, more so now than ever before. After his death in 1906, Aaron Wilson of The Savage Club wrote of Fitzgerald, as ‘an artist who will probably be more appreciated in time to come than he is in his own lifetime’ (Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, pg. 98).