Fitzgerald's "The Fairies Banquet" - Print

“The Fairies Banquet” painted in 1859; Oil on canvas. John Anster Fitzgerald, 1819 -1906, was a Victorian era fairy painter and portrait artist. He was nicknamed "Fairy Fitzgerald" for his main genre. Many of his fairy paintings are dark and contain images of ghouls, demons, and references to drug use. As an artist, Fitzgerald appears to have been largely self-taught. His work was first shown at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1845; he also exhibited at the British Institution, the Society of British Artists, and the Watercolor Society. In the late 1850’s he created a series of Christmas fairies for “The Illustrated London News”. Fitzgerald gave his works titles that often gave little clear indication of their subjects; art dealers and collectors frequently re-named them, causing great confusion in his artistic canon. Some of Fitzgerald's titles, like “The Pipe Dream” and “The Captive Dreamer”, suggest that "Fitzgerald was familiar with the opium dens which, with choral and laudanum, represented the Victorian drug scene”. Fitzgerald created remarkable fairy pictures of pure fantasy, rarely based on any literary theme. In Fitzgerald’s paintings, the fairy queen usually sits at a toadstool laden with elaborate bowls of fruit. Round the toadstool table the fairies congregate, usually with wings and highly ornamental flower head-dresses as we see here in this picture.