Moving into the 20th Century, fairies showed few signs of buzzing off – if anything, they cemented their place. The standard fairy fancy dress outfit today is basically the same as what these Victorian children would have worn: think tinsel, sparkly sequins, and translucent, gauzy wings. "Every Victorian pantomime would have this big spectacle of transformation at the end, where children dressed as fairies filled the stage," says Sage. Illustrated children's books really took off from the 1870s, with fairies a staple, and increasingly cutesy, feature. The Victorians promoted the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, requiring its own entertainment. One was that "children's literature happened", says Sage. Then two wider cultural developments came along that changed fairy reputations forever. But there was still a sense of otherworldly strangeness in many of their depictions – as seen in the work of Richard Dadd, who made his hyper-intricate fairy paintings while living in a Victorian asylum after killing his father. John Anster Fitzgerald, Edwin Landseer, John Everett Millais, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham and even JMW Turner – among many others – painted supernatural sprites from the 1840s onwards. As the Victorian era progressed, they are increasingly associated with childhood as their popularity grew, they shrank.īut first, fairies became a fashionable subject for Victorian artists, often taking inspiration from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. "Throughout the 19th Century, fairies became increasingly miniaturised, sapped of their power – trapped in the nursery," says Sage. Yet within 100 years, the whole conception of fairies completely changed. "In 1800, if you thought your child was a fairy it would have been like demonic possession – you would have put that child in the fire to drive out the fairy," points out Alice Sage, a curator and historian. But for many hundreds of years, they were not necessarily tiny and fey, but grotesque or fierce elemental forces, capable of great darkness. Fairy art even had the stamp of royal approval: Queen Mary was a fan of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite's ethereal drawings, and helped popularise them by sending them in postcard form.įairies have long been with us – in our imaginations, at least. Over 350 fairy books were published in the UK between 19, including in Enid Blyton's first fairy foray, a collection of poems called Real Fairies in 1923. In fact, fairy fever swelled within the United Kingdom for over half a century, reaching something of a peak around the time the Flower Fairies emerged in 1923. The Flower Fairies were an immediate hit – but Barker was far from the only artist of her era to find success with fairies. Billie Eilish recently had Flower Fairies tattooed on her hand, while their whimsical, floral aesthetic can be seen in the TikTok "fairycore" trend. The Flower Fairies' influence has endured: they have never been out of print, and continue to be popular around the world – big in Japan and in Italy, where Gucci released a children's range featuring Barker's prints in 2022. 2023 marks 100 years since the publication of her first book of poems and pictures, Flower Fairies of the Spring – an anniversary currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery in Merseyside, UK. If so, it's likely you've been influenced by Cicely Mary Barker, the British illustrator who created the Flower Fairies. Is the picture that appears in your mind's eye a tiny, pretty, magical figure – a childish wisp with insect-like wings and a dress made of petals?
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