John Anster Fitzgerald

(British, 1823-1906)

In Memoriam

Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a deceased's estate.

A master of Victorian fairy painting, John Anster Fitzgerald received little formal training as a child; despite this, he became a prolific exhibitor at the Royal Academy and at the British Institution from 1845, showing nearly 200 works. A regular contributor to the Illustrated London News and a member of the Maddox Street Sketching Club, Fitzgerald found his metier with his fantasy paintings, his works often depicting a sleeping figure, surrounded by the grotesque and fantastical visions of their dreams; in works such as The artist's dream (BI, 1857) and The stuff that dreams are made of Fitzgerald uses the motif to wonderful effect. These works may well have been drug-induced visions, Lionel Lambourne noting that these subjects suggest that 'Fitzgerald was familiar with the opium dens which, with chloral and laudanum, represented the Victorian drug scene'¹.

Like Noel Paton and Richard Dadd, the fine detail in Fitzgerald's fairy paintings can be both elaborate and exquisite. Drawing from Celtic myth, Shakespeare and his own imagination, he creates delicate worlds, rendered in bright colours. See for example The Fairie's banquet, The Fairy's funeral (BI, 1864) and The captive robin.

Fitzgerald exhibited two works at the British Institution in 1861, entitled Winter (no. 470, also exhibited at the Royal Academy, no. 634) and Summer (no. 474), possible candidates for the present and subsequent lots.

¹Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting, London, 1999, p.198.