Fairies in Victorian Art

To many of us at the end of one century and start of another, the Victorian and Edwardian fascination with fairies seems at best naïve and rather twee, and at worst sinister. But at the time it was a real enough and widespread interest, and some vestiges of it remain embedded in our culture. Between about 1840 and 1870 especially it led to a golden age of fairy painting, although the story in this latest Antique Collectors’ Club monograph starts with William Blake and proceeds well into the first half of the twentieth century. But the core is the “high...