Estella Canziani- piper of dreams

I have described before how fairy art made a contribution to the 1914-18 war effort, through artist Estella Canziani’s 1915 painting The Piper of Dreams, an image that became immensely popular amongst troops and their families.  The Piper remains Canziani’s best known picture, but she had many other accomplishments and she painted several other faery scenes.

Canziani (1887-1964) was born in London, the daughter of painter Louisa Starr, who herself produced some ‘fantasy’ paintings, such as ‘A Fairy Tale’ in 1869 and ‘Undine’ the next year.  Canziani lived her whole life in the same house, but she travelled extensively and published three travel books based on these trips.  She was a painter, worked as a book illustrator and wrote articles in Folklore, the journal of the Folklore Society.

Canziani had started to paint The Piper of Dreams at Easter 1914,  demonstrating that there was no thought on her part to produce an image that might cheer ‘our boys’ in the trenches with thoughts of home.  Instead, it is a clear testament to the fact that she had inherited her mother’s interest in fantasy scenes.  The picture’s original title was ‘Where the little things of the wood live unseen,’ nowhere near as emotive as the label it bore at the Royal Academy exhibition the next summer.  The canvas sold the day the exhibition opened and hundreds of thousands of copies of the picture were sold over the next few years and posted to troops across the world.

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, San Marco, 1437-46

In 1919 Canziani painted The Fairy of Childhood, which portrays a fae in a long red dress, seated on a tree stump, watching over a mother and baby who have fallen asleep in wild and lonely landscape.  The fairy has red wings that fade to white towards the feather tips, making it look a good deal more like one of Fra Angelico’s angels, but there is a second, much smaller, blue sprite with wings sits on the ground in the foreground, perhaps confirming that we are witnessing a supernatural rather than heavenly scene.  Other fairy pictures that Canziani painted include Fairies Bless the New-Born (see this posting for a reproduction of this), in which an armoured knight kneels before a stream or pool holding a naked baby whilst pale spirits arise from the water, and Dancing Sea Nymphs (1938) showing three naiads emerging from the surf on a beach, apparently celebrating the sunrise with music.

Perhaps rather more sinister is The Enchanted Basin, in which a boy and girl watch in wonder as another pale water sprite emerges from the surface of a pond chasing bubbles.  My caution here comes not so much from the painting itself but from a wariness over fae water sprites, as I will describe in my forthcoming book Beyond Faery.  Admittedly, the naiad here looks charming enough, but looks can be deceptive– especially where water is involved.

The Dwarf

As mentioned, Canziani was also an illustrator and in 1923 she received a commission to work on an edition of Walter de la Mare’s Songs of Childhood.  This incorporated several fairy plates: ‘Oh Dear Me!’ shows a little girl seated outside in a grassy place whilst fairies swirl around her; in ‘Down a Derry’ mermaids play instruments beneath the sea; ‘The Dwarf’ features a boy and a girl running along the ground as angel or fairy-like creatures with red wings soar away from them and, finally, in the plate for ‘Fairies Dancing’ a cloud of gauzy beings swarm in a woodland glade with a castle in the background.

The plates don’t quite match the poems for which they’re named.  For instance, The Dwarf above seems to fit better with the verse titled The Gnomies:

‘Come away

Child and play,

Light wi’ the gnomies;

In a mound,

Green and round,

That’s where their home is!

We must also forgive de la Mare a truly terrible rhyme here.  As for Oh Dear Me!, it seems to best be matched by Bluebells:

Where the bluebells and the wind are,

Fairies in a ring I spied,

And I heard a little linnet

Singing near beside.

 

Where the primrose and the dew are,

Soon were sped the fairies all:

Only now the green turf freshens,

And the linnets call.

‘Oh dear me’

Lastly, in the charming Good Morning (c.1931), another blonde-haired being in a red dress (this time with more definitely fairy wings of a gauzy, butterfly description) appears to a young girl. The child has poked her head out of the front window of her home, presumably attracted by the sound of the pipe that the fairy is playing; the girl now stares in utter amazement at the vision that has appeared in an ordinary city street.  There’s a gentle humour to this vignette- something in the little girl’s posture I think- which contrasts with the sober scene of destitution and isolation that we see in The Fairy of Childhood.

Estella Canziani was not a truly great artist, but her pictures are bright and attractive.  For further information about her and about twentieth century fairy art in general, see my book on the subject, Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century.

Marc Symonds- a faery artist

Fairy Tale, 1935

Mark Lancelot Symons (1887-1930) was an English painter who has been described both as a Symbolist and as a Pre-Raphaelite follower. His fairy art is in many respects transitional, between Victorian and modern in both its influences and style.

Symons was born in Hampstead, London, but spent his childhood in Sussex in a strictly orthodox Catholic family, the impact of which can be seen in the religious imagery of many of his pictures. Symon’s family mixed in artistic circles and Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Hercules Brabazon were all friends. Symons studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1905 and 1909 but after this became a monk. It was not until 1924 that he became a full-time painter and he died quite young.

Floating Fairy with Nude Youth

Many of Symon’s works depict Biblical incidents, or have an explicit Christian theme, but at the same time they abound with naked fairy children, all painted in his bright, clear, almost hyper-realist manner.  Amongst the works in which a less orthodox supernatural influence intrude are Floating Fairy with Nude Youth in the Background, which bears strong resemblances to some works by William Blake, and A Fairy Tale, of 1935.  This latter image closely resembles many of Symon’s other canvases: a young woman lies asleep amongst ruined stonework and honeysuckle; whilst she dreams, a host of naked fairy girls have appeared around her, singing, playing and cavorting in the air.  Most have gauzy dragonfly wings, a few have pieces of material draped loosely about them.  Most seem only partly aware of the sleeping human figure nearby.  One holds a long trumpet, something we might associate more with an angel rather than a fairy (although they are known to having hunting horns and both Tennyson and Dunsany described ‘horns of elfland’ in their work.)

Earthly Paradise, 1934

Ave Maria, 1928

Symons’ naked fairy girls might- given his background- be viewed as cherub-like symbols of innocence.  True enough, his religious scenes involving the holy family, such as his Earthly Paradise of 1934, are as replete with naked young bodies as Fairy Tale.  At the same time, though, similar writhing masses of flesh are seen in pictures such Sir Noel Paton’s Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, where they have clear erotic intent, and John McKirdy Duncan’s Yorinda and Yoringel of 1909 features a group of prepubescent nudes dancing around the two main characters.  In some respects, these scenes of orgy- like indulgence bring to mind Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Paton, Oberon and Titania

John McKirdy Duncan, Yorinda & Yoringel

Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, 1510

At the same time as Symons was working, Arthur Rackham continued to portray a fairyland full of bared youthful flesh and, in the late twentieth century, this theme came to the fore again in the work of Alan Lee and Brian Froud.  Naked juveniles have come to be seen as a defining aspect of Faery, perhaps indicative of the fairies’ uninhibited and natural state.

Rackham, Three Wood Nymphs Gathering Flowers

Art critic Susan Casteras has been quite assiduous in identifying sexual scenes in Victorian fairy paintings in which the protagonists are adolescents or younger.  For example, in the Paton picture above, she points out several incidents, including the girl “with budding breasts” in the lower right hand corner, who is being propositioned by a clothed male fairy.  Casteras finds pubescent or prepubescent lovers everywhere, in scenes by Richard Dadd, Robert Huskisson and John Anster Fitzgerald.  As she remarks, they are displayed to us in a consequence-free voyeurism of the fairies’ intimacies.

For Casteras, these children behaving in adult ways convey several messages.  The diminutive size of most fairies is linked to sexuality in a covert manner.   The child lovers can simultaneously negate any suggestion of sexual contact, whilst still depicting it as possible.  The use of mythical beings allows all sorts of licentious and taboo behaviour to be shown without it seeming to be endorsed, not least amongst which are scenes in which female fairies are granted as much sexual appetite and freedom as males.  At the same time, many of the anxieties of Victorian Britain could be portrayed: the liberated sexual gymnastics of fairyland still involve plenty of sexual menace and violence by (older) males to the girl faes.  All in all, Casteras believes, these paintings provided a safety valve.  They are a “pre-Freudian displacement of sexuality into a childhood realm.” The adult purchasers of these images could in safety view them, but not participate.  They offered contemporary audiences a potent visual mix of nudity, the latent appeal of childhood, the qualities of vulnerability and even latent paedophilia.  (see Casteras in M. Brown, Picturing Children, 2017, 130-140).

Froud, Faeries

Modern artists continue to portray fairies as naked girls, very possibly still confronting the same societal issues that motivated Victorian painters.  This trend was, perhaps, initiated by Brian Froud and Alan Lee in Faeries in 1977.  In these respects, the illustrations may very much have been a product of their time, but the trend persists some thirty years later, in a very different moral climate.

French artist Erlé Ferronniere has created many very attractive visions of fairyland, of which just two are reproduced here.  Most of his fairies are young girls, many are dressed in clothes made of dried leaves, but some are naked.  Like Symons’ fairies, they suggest a state of nature, unconscious and unashamed.

Lastly, another French draughtsman, Jean-Baptiste Monge, has produced very similar designs, albeit it with rather bustier and saucier faes.  Faery, nudity and youthful sexuality have become inseparable in the minds of many, it seems.  See too my book Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century.

Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century

I am pleased to announce the publication in paperback, and as an e-book, of my latest book, Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century.  

As I describe in the book, a great deal has been written about the Victorian fairy painters like Richard Dadd, Sir Noel Paton and Dickie Doyle, but there has been much less focus on their successors in the next century.  This may partly be because most of the art of the twentieth century was not ‘fine art’ (oil paintings hung in galleries) but was illustration instead- and that for children’s books.  The major artists of the genre, Cicely Mary Barker and Margaret Tarrant (of flower fairy fame), Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Mabel Lucie Attwell, have been the subjects of biographies and monographs on their work, but most of the other artists and their work is more neglected.  That many were women, who were dealing with ‘female’ subjects (i.e. drawing fairies for children) may have contributed considerably to this lack of attention.

In this book I try to begin to redress the balance by providing short biographies of all the artists I have been able to identify, along with descriptions of their work.  In addition, I put the fairy art of last century in the context of what preceded it and identify the main themes and styles used in fairy imagery.

Twentieth century fairy art was shaped by the Victorian pictures and, in turn, the way that all of us imagine fairies has been moulded by the vision of those twentieth century artists.  So many elements of fairy iconography that we tend to take for granted- flower fairies; round pixies dressed in green; female faes and male goblins and gnomes; pointy hats and shoes; tiny size and childish looks- all come from the twentieth century illustrators.  They created a fairyland that was, by and large, very safe and welcoming for children.  Not all of these artists were very talented, but even in their reduction of Faery to the lowest common denominators, they have something significant to tell us about the way that our parents, grandparents and great grandparents understood the fairy world.

A card designed by Freda Mabel Rose, c.1930s

Fairy art evolved over the century, of course.  For at least decade it continued Victorian styles and themes before, after the First World War, new formats for children’s books and new media (most notably postcards) provided new markets and new design possibilities for artists.  This reorientation of the genre to purely juvenile audiences- and the need for images that were instantly attractive and commercially viable- had a major impact on fairy art.  Much of it lost the edge of threat- and sexuality- that characterised earlier representations. Critic Susan Casteras has remarked how painters like Tarrant, Barker and Attwell tried to ‘revive’ Victorian fairy painting, but did so only by portraying fairies who were winged, child-like and sometimes chubby- fairies who were adult neither in their form nor their behaviour.  (Casteras in M. Brown, Picturing Children, 2017, 139).

That fairy illustrations created for children’s books need not necessarily be devoid of darker themes is demonstrated by the work of Arthur Rackham, but after his death in 1939 the anodyne and the harmless took hold for several decades.

Hester Margetson, Fairy Snow-drop

It was only with the appearance of Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee that a more authentic atmosphere was restored to depictions of Faery.  This has continued since- alongside less challenging images.

These expressions of personal taste aside, the fact remains that twentieth century fairy art is rich and multitudinous. Because the artists created their works for reproduction on mass produced media such as postcards and greetings cards, there are far more images to absorb than was the case in Victorian times.  There’s a wealth of art out there, waiting to be discovered and appreciated.

Still Ill? Diseases caused by faeries

I have described in other posts the various ways in which the faeries can prejudice human health. Here, I want to draw these together and add details of a few other illnesses ascribed to the supernatural causes.

Fairy Blights

The fairies blight and debilitate in a variety of ways.  Overall, medical practitioners recognised that a patient might suffer from being “haunted by fairies” and that she or he might have been “stricken with some ill spirit.” (John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches, 1646, 49).  These malign attentions might manifest in various ways, depending upon the exact causes.  People might sicken and fade away, having been shot with elf-arrows; they might display similar but much more sudden symptoms after abduction and they might fall victim to paralysis.

In the Scottish Highlands, if a fairy breathed upon a person, they might be covered in huge blisters. A lesser version of these symptoms, the rash called ‘hives,’ was known in the region as the ‘fairy-pox’ or a’ bhreac-sith.  

Fairy Nips

The fairies are well known for their pinching, and severe and persistent symptoms of this were treated as a condition in its own right.  In his attack on the idea of witchcraft, A Candle in the Dark, which was written in 1655, Thomas Ady noted that:

“There are often found in Women with Childe certain spots black and blew, as if they were pinched or beaten, which some ignorant people call Fairy Nips.”

Another book of 1672, a satirical attack on Catholicism, mentions the stigmata and sneers that,  although one priest does not bear the holy marks, “he may have fairy nips, which are as bad.”

In 1671, playwright Henry Carey hinted in the epilogue to his play, The Generous Enemies, at a belief that even greater harm might be suffered by younger victims of this condition:

“like children, just alive,/ Pinched by the fairies, never after thrive.”

On Shetland, there was a condition known as ‘dead man’s nip’ which manifested as a small discoloured spot somewhere on a person’s body. It could be healed by the application of churchyard earth or by brushing with a bible.  This seems very likely to be a northerly version of the English illness, not least because fairies and the dead are often intimately associated, and most especially so in Scotland.

Elf-Cakes

Enlargement of the spleen was also believed to have been inflicted by vengeful fairies.  Thomas Lupton in 1579 made reference to “hardnes of the syde, called the Elfe-cake.” Herbalist William Langham in his 1597 book The Garden of Health prescribed certain ‘simples’ to “heale elfe cake and the hardnesses of the side.”  In these cases the word ‘cake’ seems to be used in the sense of a congealed mass, rather as in ‘cake of soap.’

Cures

Very fortunately, as I have described several times, the fairies often supply the cure as frequently as they inflict a blight.  The remedies to fairy illness are as numerous as the illnesses they cause, ranging from using belts and girdles to cure to the many herbal treatments I have described.

For further information on sickness and healing, see chapters 12 and 13 of my Faery (2020).  see too my Darker Side of Faery (2021):

Fairy herbs

J W Waterhouse, The Sorceress, 1913

I have previously drawn attention to the various herbal remedies prepared and prescribed by faeries.  In this post I add a few more ingredients to the fairy pharmacopeia.

Ointments

We know very well that the fairies collected and processed plants for medicine.  Suspected witch Alesoun Peirsoun spent seven years visiting Elfame and had seen the Good Neighbours making salves in pans over fires, using herbs picked before sunrise.  The trows of Shetland did the exactly same because, in the story of Farquhar’s Pig (a pig was a small earthenware jar or bottle), a container of healing ointment is obtained from them (against their will) by claiming it in God’s name.  This invocation rendered them powerless to stop the human seizing the vessel.

In some sources we are simply told, very frustratingly, that the fairies used ‘herbs.’  For example, in Enys Tregarthen’s story The Pisky Purse she describes “herbs and flowers wet with fairy dew” being gathered to make eye salves and other ointments, but we aren’t given any more detail than this.  The ‘green herbes’ used by Bartie Paterson in 1607 are another instance of this vagueness.

Medicines & powders

Luckily, the records are often a lot more specific and helpful.  According to the manuscript, Sloane MS 73 f.125, a person who has been taken by elves can be treated as follows:

“Take the root of gladen and make a poudre thereof, and ȝeve the sike both in his metes and in his drynkes, and he schal be hool within ix days and ix nyȝtes, or be deed, for certeyn.”

‘Gladen’ is the common iris, formerly called orris root.  When fresh, it is poisonous; dried, it used to be employed as a flavouring.  In this form it would at least do no harm, so the patient’s recovery of their whole health, or their death, probably couldn’t be ascribed to their treatment.  The rather fatalistic attitude of the text might suggest that the author knew that the treatment would make no difference and that, instead, nature would take its course.  (NB: in Norfolk ‘gladen’ denotes the cat’s tail, or bulrush, a plant with absolutely no known medicinal or food properties).

In 1597 four Edinburgh women were tried for alleged witchcraft and for being associated with the “Farie-folk.’  They appear to have been traditional healers, claiming to have been taught their remedies by the Good Folk.  Christian Lewinstoun, for example, made one treatment by mixing fresh butter with a ‘sweet wort.’ She bathed one of her patients in woodbine and resin and  treated heart disease in another by seething broom and chamomile in white wine.  The former herb has many medicinal properties, including reducing the narrowing of blood vessels; chamomile, too, has a range of healing properties. This suggests that we have here a folk remedy with some genuine benefits.

Lewinstoun also, much less wisely, prescribed mercury (both as a salve and as a drink) to at least two sick people.  The element is highly toxic- although ‘trained’ physicans used it without hesitation during the same period.  Another of the group who faced trial, Jonet Stewart, advised bathing in red nettles and alexanders; she also made a salve by seething alexanders in butter.  Alexanders can promote appetite, aid digestion and act as a mild diuretic and disinfectant.  Nettles share these properties and can reduce inflammation, so again there were some healing properties to these ingredients and certainly nothing magical.

Elsewhere in Scotland flax (the ‘blue-eyed one of the fairy woman’ or, in Gaelic, gorm-shuileach na mna sith) was used as a medicine as well as to protect people against the elves and the sluagh.  In Wales the plant ‘purging flax’ was called llin y tylwyth teg, or fairy flax.  Flax seeds have a range of medicinal properties, as their continued use today demonstrates, so that we have, again, a good indication of a genuine folk cure.

Further Reading

See my posts on fairy inflicted illnesses, physical as well as psychological, and on the treatments, which included the use of still and running water and belts as well as herbs.  See to my Faery, chapters 12 and 13.  There is also detailed discussion of the faeries’ healing powers in my 2021 book The Faery Lifecycle:

Children’s encounters with faeries- folklore & art

Postcard, by Agnes Richardson

It’s frequently said that children are especially able to see the fairies- perhaps because of their innate innocence, perhaps because they are endowed with a sort of second sight and so are open to wonder and magic and are not closed off mentally by rationality and ‘good sense,’ as adults can be.

Children’s Second Sight

The folklore evidence as to the existence of special powers in children is equivocal.  The sheer number of accounts that could be analysed mean that a statistical test of this is impractical, so I rely on my anecdotal impression of all the reports I’ve read to say that there’s no special bias towards infants: any one of any age and any sex is liable to see the Good Folk, it seems from the folk stories.  However, we can be a bit more scientific about the more recent reports.  Consolidating the cases of sightings from the Fairy Census  and from Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies,  it’s possible to say that around a third of witnesses were children.  Of these, about 80% were girls.

Margaret Tarrant, Fairy Secrets

What do the above statistics tell us?  Well, for developed countries, the proportion of children seems high.  In the UK, those under 18 make up about 21% of the population; in the USA it’s 24%, whilst 14% of the German population are 17 and under.  It seems, then, that children are indeed now slightly more likely to experience a fairy encounter; and girls are obviously significantly more likely.  Whether this is reflective of genuine differences, or of a sexist tendency for it to be acceptable for female children to express such ideas, and for boys not to do so, is much less clear.

Acquiring Second Sight

On the whole, though, age appears to be much less a factor in seeing fairies than other influences.  Doubtless a pre-existing predisposition to belief- even an expectation that a fairy might be seen- must help.  In earlier generations, other explanations for being able to see supernaturals were advanced.  For example, those born on a Sunday were said to be more prone to second sight (Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p.81); others said that it was those born early in the morning who acquired the gift (Spence, British Fairy Tradition, p.160).  Some people might be genetically more likely to have these experiences; others may acquire the second sight as a gift from the fairies.

The fact seems to be that some people are lucky enough to have the second sight and the majority of others are not.  The ability does not discriminate by any physical factors.  For example, Martin Martin, touring the Hebridean islands in the eighteenth century, reported the local belief that not only children, but horses and cows as well, were all believed to be endowed with the ability to see the sith folk

Tarrant, Brownie’s dream

Tarrant, Girls and fairies at magic pool

The differential nature of the gift is demonstrated very well in an account from Sutherland in the far north of Scotland.   In 1937 an old woman told a folklorist how, as a small girl, she had gone out with her mother one summer evening to tend the cows in the field.  The little girl was able to see small green people playing near the cattle, although her mother saw nothing.  Very possibly, however, if the mother had held her daughter’s hand, she would have seen the Good Folk- it’s very common for the sight to be easily transferred by contact in this manner.

Tarrant, On Primrose Hill

Sightings by Children

Now, to turn to my illustrations, which are largely taken from postcards and books of the 1920s and 1930s.  What will be apparent instantly is that the authors and artists of this period were quite blase about the experience of contact with the faes.  Although, as I have explained several times in previous postings, people (especially children) are very vulnerable to abduction, you might know nothing of this danger from these pictures.  Instead, it’s all rather charming and lovely.  Kids- and in particular girls- are encouraged to hope for these encounters and to plunge into them without hesitation.

Tarrant, Elfin Band

Suggesting to anyone, especially guileless infants, that a free and easy approach to fairy contact is advisable seems- in light of all the folklore evidence- to be extremely unwise, even reckless.  Clearly, by the interwar period, the fairies had been reduced in the minds of many to harmless and probably unreal little beings- just perfect for amusing little girls.  Margaret Tarrant- presumably in a play upon the name of the junior girl guiding organisation, the Brownies, and the domestic fairies of British tradition, also called brownies– seems to actively promote contact as a harmless pastime for young Guides. The human Brownies were so-called (I assume) because they were encouraged and expected to undertake lots of little household chores for mother (just like their supernatural counterparts); the risk is, of course, that they’ll be kidnapped and made into slaves for the fairies.

Tarrant, Brownie’s clock

There’s seldom a hint in all these images that any wariness is required.  A few suggest a hesitation on the child’s part, or a sensible inclination to spy from a place of concealment, but most of the subjects make no attempt to protect themselves, or appear to experience any apprehension.  All I can say is- you have been warned….

Tarrant, Nearly there

Tarrant, Queen of the Brownies

Last thoughts

The fairy themed children’s books and postcards that were so abundant during the interwar period enriched our visual culture immensely- I’m thinking especially of the work of Cicely Mary Barker and Margaret Tarrant and their flower fairy illustrations but, as this post shows, many other artists were active during those decades as well.

However, these artists showed little awareness of or respect for British folk tradition and the fairies they promoted to the card buying public were almost exclusively sweet and harmless.  Nevertheless, others (such as Marjorie Johnson) maintained actual contact with Faery and, as some of the recent encounters in the Fairy Census demonstrate, the Good Folk are still temperamental and potentially perilous.

For further discussion, see my book Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century and also follow the links to earlier posts in the text and see too chapter 12 of my book Faery.

Tarrant, Angelina in the garden

Florence Choate

Hilda Cowham, I wonder where Angelina is?

A ‘Fairy Playdate’ invitation card by Dorothy Wheeler

Fairy Home by Dorothy Wheeler

‘The Fairy Queen’ from the ABC Book

Beatrice Goldsmith, Little Girl with Fairy

A fairy abduction, by Helen Jacobs

Florence Harrison, A Moonlight Party

Florence Harrison, In the Fairy Ring

Florence Harrison, Elfin Song

Susan Beatrice Pearce, A girl meets the fairies