Notes
THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
J.A. Fitzgerald was one of the most important exponents of the phenomenon of Fairy Painting, which seized the popular imagination in the Victorian era. He was represented by more works than any other artist in the major exhibition devoted to the subject that opened at the Royal Academy in 1997 and was subsequently seen in Canada and the United States.
It is probably no accident that many of the artists who attempted fairy subjects were Irish or of Irish extraction. Francis Danby, Daniel Maclise and the brothers Richard and Charles Doyle are examples, and Fitzgerald himself was another. His grandfather, after whom he was named, was a colonel in an Irish regiment of the Dutch army. His father was William Thomas Fitzgerald, an indifferent poet, who did not marry until he was about sixty, and John Anster was the third of six children whom he fathered in quick succession.
The artist was born in London, where he continued to live all his life. Nothing is known of his formal or artistic education, but in 1845, when he was twenty-two, he made his debut at the Royal Academy. He was also to support the British Institution, the Society of British Artists (to which he sought election in 1864), and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours, while showing further works at the Maddox Street Sketching Club. He continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy until 1881, but there was then a long interval until 1902, when he contributed one more picture before his death four years later. It is possible that this late appearance was connected with his being awarded a Royal Academy pension.
Little is known of Fitzgerald the man, but at the Savage Club, of which he was a member, he was known for his impersonations of long dead actors such as Kemble, Kean and Macready, uttered in a rich Irish brogue. Harry Furniss remembered him with affection in his
reminiscences, My Bohemian Days, 1919. 'He was a picturesque old chap, imbued with traditions of the transpontine drama [i.e. the Old Vic]...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 in colour and black-and-white, was devoted to fairy scenes; in fact his life was one long Midsummer Night's Dream.'
Although Fitzgerald is best known today for his fairy subjects, his range seems to have been wider. He is often said to have earned his living from portraiture, although little evidence of this activity appears to survive. By the late 1850s he had become a regular contributor to The Illustrated London News, specialising in fairy subjects for the magazine's Christmas numbers. His characteristic style clearly owed much to the Pre-Raphaelites, whose influence is very evident in a work such as Christmas, a genre scene exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858 and sold Christie's, London, 2 November 1990 (lot 274c).
In fact Fitzgerald was almost certainly in touch with the Pre-Raphaelite circle through the Gothic Revival architect William Burges. He helped to decorate Burges's Gothic furniture, notably the celebrated Great Bookcase (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), an enormous piece designed in 1859 to hold the architect's collection of books on art and exhibited at the International Exhibition at South Kensington in 1862. The theme of the decoration was Pagan and Christian Art and many artists were involved besides Fitzgerald, who painted a panel of the Sirens. Others included Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Poynter, Albert Moore, Simeon Solomon, Henry Holiday, Stacy Marks, Frederick Smallfield and W.F. Yeames. All these men were friends of Burges, and had something to contribute to his extravagant project. None, however, equalled him in eccentricity and love of fantasy more than J.A. Fitzgerald.
His works often feature birds and small animals, as well as fantastically attired denizens of the fairy kingdom and they have a hallucinatory quality, as if they were the products of drug induced dreams. It is hard to believe that Fitzgerald was not familiar with the work of Hieronymus Bosch (fig. 1). It is also conceivable that he experimented with opium, a hypothesis that would help to account not only for his troubled imagery but the unnatural vibrancy of his colours. Equally, this may betray the influence of the stage, of which he was clearly a devotee. It is as if his scenes are lit by the brilliant limelight that had become popular by the 1850s, particularly for the pantomines which his paintings sometimes resemble.
The present watercolour would appear to be inspired by a scene from Shakespeare's, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as such is unusual, in Fitzgerald's oeuvre. Most of the older fairy painters, whether pioneers like Reynolds, Fuseli (Titania and Bottom, 1786-9, Tate Gallery, London) and Blake or more senior Victorians such as Landseer, (Scene from a Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania and Bottom, 1848-1851, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), Noël Paton (The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, 1847, and The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) and Richard Dadd, whose masterpiece Contradiction; Oberon and Titania was sold Christie's, London, 12 June 1992, lot 120, (£1,650,000) derived their subjects from literary sources. The most popular being Shakespeare's two plays with supernatural themes, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.
Fitzgerald did on occasions use literary references, as in Titania and Bottom: Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was sold on 25 June 1998, lot 306 for the world record price of £386,500 (fig. 2) and Ariel, 1858, from The Tempest (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) painted the year after Charles Kean's famous production. However Fitzgerald's most characteristic works represent a significant break with this tradition, showing fairy subjects which seem to be essentially his own invention.
Act II of A Midsummer Night's Dream, opens with a disagreement between Titania and Oberon, which sets the whole action of the play in motion. The cause is Titania's refusal to give Oberon a little changeling boy, whose mother had been Titania's friend and upon whose death the fairy queen stole from his nurse, and brought him up in the woods. Oberon meets Titania in the woods and asks 'Why does Titania cross her Oberon? I do but beg a little changeling boy, to be my henchman.' To which the fairy queen replies 'Set your heart at rest, the fairy land buys not the child of me.' As fairies are close to Nature, the effect of their quarrel is to unleash the malevolent forces of nature and spread dissension and misunderstanding.
Titania is shown embracing the changeling child, while her fairy attendants look on in the left of the picture. Oberon with his attendants may be the figure in the upper right corner; the mischievous Puck dances in the foreground as he tries to steal the garland of flowers. Fitzgerald has deployed some of his favourite fairy motifs in the present watercolour; musical instruments fashioned from objects of the natural world, such as the spider's web harp and the flower trumpeter and insects being ridden by sprites. The watercolour is surrounded by a border of wildflowers, dog roses, sweets peas, convolvulus and foxgloves. Purple convolvulus is a narcotic and the meaning of this flower can either be sleep or death, on the right hand Fitzgerald has painted the poisonous foxglove, both flowers may suggest more sinister connotations.
A watercolour by Fitzgerald entitled The Wounded Squirrel was sold Christie's, London, 28 November 2001, lot 29 (£124,750).
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis
Please note that the size should read 11 1/4 x 17 1/2 in. (28.6 x 44.5 cm.) and not as stated in the catalogue.
