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John Anster Fitzgerald: The Captive Robin 1864
Following a subject theme initially indicated by Henry Fuseli and William Blake in the previous century, by the 1850s the genre of ‘Fairy Painting’ had attracted both artists and an admiring public. The key practitioners of this aspect of the fantastic, included artists like Richard Dadd, Richard Doyle, John Anster Fitzgerald - even Millais and Rossetti dabbled in this interesting aspect of Victorian taste and psychology. Called ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ by his contemporaries, his subject matter - often with dark, sinister undertones, and his absorption with the fantastic, suggest that he have been familiar with Laudanum, Opium or other mind-altering, vision-inducing drugs, such as Chloral - a popular hypnotic and sedative much favoured by Fitzgerald’s contemporary, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
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