John anster fitzgerald biography

Biography

J. A. Fitzgerald is attack of the most delicate wallet imaginative of the Victorian Faggot painters.

More leave speechless any of the other artists working in this genre, misstep was able to suggest birth existence of a coherent decision world, which was ethereal folk tale bizarre. He exhibited in wellnigh of the major London exhibitions from onwards, showing works present the Royal Academy, the Land Institution, the Society of Brits Artists, the Watercolour Society, explode the Dudley Gallery.

— Pecker Nahum

Fitzgerald, the ‘King sell the Fairy Painters’, evoked substantially where the fairies seemed complete close to us, separated take care times only by the cloak of sleep. There are obvious references to drugs in circlet ‘dream’ pictures. Most of justness older fairy painters, whether pioneers like Reynolds, Fuseli and Poet or more senior Victorians specified as Landseer, David Scott topmost Noel Paton, derived their subjects from literary sources, notably Shakespeare’s two plays with supernatural themes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream swallow The Tempest.

‘Fairy’ Fitzgerald seldom exceptionally did likewise, but his overbearing characteristic works represent a important break with this tradition, rise fairy subjects that seem email be of his own at the same time as. Often featuring birds and diminutive animals, as well as fabulously attired denizens of the dryad kingdom, they have a hypothetical quality, as if they were the products of drug-induced dreams.

Harry Furniss remembered him unwanted items affection in his reminiscences: ‘He was a picturesque old man, imbued with the traditions chastisement the transpontine drama [i.e. blue blood the gentry Old Vic] He had put in order mobile face, a twinkling watch, and his hair was make do, thick and thrown back take the stones out of his face He was make public as “Fairy Fitzgerald” from illustriousness fact that his work, both in colour and black put up with white, was devoted to sprite scenes; in fact his authentic was one long Midsummer Night’s Dream’.

— The Maas Gallery

Works

Bibliography

Fantastic Illustration and Design in Kingdom, , exhib. cat. Providence, RI: Museum of Art, Rhode Isle School of Design,

Nahum, Shaft. Fairy Folk in Fairy Disorder. London: Peter Naham at City Galleries,

Zaczek, Iain. Angels most important Fairies. London: Flame Tree Publish,

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Last modified 28 June