Midsummer Night's Fairies

Details

JOHN GEORGE NAISH (BRITISH, 1824-1905)
Midsummer Night's Fairies
signed with the artist's monogram (lower right); titled 'Midsummer Night's Fairies/Painted by John George Naish/.../Royal Crescent/Notting Hill/London' (on the reverse)
oil on panel
13 7/8 x 18 in. (35 x 45.7 cm.)
Painted circa 1856.

Provenance

with Christopher Wood, Inc., New York.
Edmund J. (1912-1988) and Suzanne McCormick, Dobbs Ferry, NY, acquired directly from the above, 1978.
Their sale; Sotheby's, New York, 28 February 1990, lot 156, illustrated and on the cover, as Midsummer Fairies.
Private collection, acquired at the above sale.
Their sale; Sotheby's, New York, 24 October 1996, lot 222, illustrated.
Acquired by Ann and Gordon Getty from the above.

Literature

'The British Institution,' The Art Journal, no. 18, London, 1856, p. 84, as Midsummer Fairies.
J. Dafforne, 'The Works of John George Naish,' The Art Journal, vol. 1, New York, 1875, p. 326, as Midsummer-Fairies.
C. E. Clement and L. Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, Boston, 1885, p. 181, as Midsummer Fairies.
B. Phillpotts, Fairy Paintings, London, 1978, p. 15, pl. 25, illustrated, as Midsummer Fairies.
B. Phillpotts, 'Victorian Fairy Painting,' The Antique Collector, v. 49, no. 7, London, July 1978, p. 80, illustrated, as Midsummer Fairies.
C. Forbes, 'McCormick's Victorian Reapings: An American Collection of British Nineteenth-Century Pictures,' Nineteenth Century, vol. 6, Philadelphia, summer 1980, pp. 40, 45, illustrated, as Midsummer Fairies.
L. Sonntag, Butterflies, London, 1980, illustrated pp. 22-23, as Midsummer Fairies.
M. M. Kahmi, 'Victorian Treasures: Paintings from the McCormick Collection,' Aristos, the Journal of Esthetics, vol. 3, no. 4, 4 March 1987, pp. 3, 5.
E. Stiles, A Small Book of Fairies, Rohnert Park, CA, 1995, pp. 3, 30, 31, 85, illustrated and illustrated with a detail, as The Midsummer Fairies.
Fairies: An Anthology of Verse and Prose, London, 1996, p. 64, illustrated on the front jacket with the image inverted.
C. G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, Oxford, 1999, p. 161, as Midsummer Fairies.
D. and P. Cope, Postcards from the Nursery: The Illustrators of Children's Books and Postcards 1900-1950, London, 2000, p. 29, as Elves and Fairies: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Painting, Suffolk, 2000, pp. 124-125, illustrated, as Elves and Fairies: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Scozia, Milan, 2001, p. 315, illustrated with a detail, p. 57, as The Midsummer Fairies.
L. Forsberg, Worlds Beyone: Minatures and Victorian Fiction, 11 May 2021, n.p., as Elves and Fairies: A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Exhibited

London, British Institution, 1856, no. 306, as Midsummer Fairies.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, The Edmund J. and Suzanne McCormick Collection, 11 January-26 February 1984, pp. 64-5, no. 25, illustrated, as Midsummer Fairies.
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, English Idylls: The Edmund J. and Suzanne McCormick Collection of Victorian Art, 9 January-13 March 1988, p. 3, no. 30, as Midsummer Fairies.
London, Royal Academy, Victorian Fairy Painting, 13 November 1997-8 February 1998; also Iowa City, University of Iowa Museum of Art, 28 February-24 May 1998; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 10 June-13 September 1998; New York, The Frick Collection, 13 October 1998-17 January 1999, p. 137, no. 60, as Elves and Fairies: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Legion of Honor, on long-term loan, May 2002-May 2007.

Conditions of sale

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Elizabeth Seigel Vice President, Specialist, Head of Private and Iconic Collections

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Lot Essay

Fairy painting was a distinctive genre in Victorian Art, and one which was accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1997 in which this picture was shown. Old religious certainties were being overturned by advances in scientific discovery, and there was a heightened interest in spiritualism, the occult, and the natural world. At the theatre, the ballet and in literature, fantasy proved popular, and artists responded to this trend in the visual arts. Naish’s Midsummer Night's Fairies became one of the most celebrated manifestations of the phenomenon in painting.
The Art Journal, when reviewing this picture when it was shown at the British Institution in 1856 noted: 'the flowers and minute figures admit of the closest examination.' Christopher Wood liked to imagine a Victorian gentleman, examining the fairies in particular, eyeglass in hand. Indeed the congested detail and botanical accuracy show the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose brotherhood was founded less than a decade previously. The artist’s vision is enhanced by the bright colors, hard edged outlines and theatrical lighting, making the scene even more insistently real. The scene evokes those in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although no quotation citing act and verse is appended to the title. Moreover, the flowers are not those of Shakespeare’s day, but are those familiar to a Victorian gardener: fuschia, geranium and nasturtium. These were not chosen for their symbolism in the detailed lexicography of the Victorian 'language of flowers', but rather for their decorative effect. Insects are used as a means of transport for the fairies, and the spider alludes to their magical powers of spinning and weaving. Traces of their fairy kingdoms would be found spun and suspended after dawn in the morning dew, making belief in fairies widespread in rural communities well into the 20th century.

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