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signed E.R. Hughes. RWS. (lower left); inscribed and titled on the backboard and inscribed and titled on a label on the reverse of the frame

watercolor and gouache on paper

PROVENANCE

Sale, Sotheby's, London, June 15, 1982, lot 119, illustrated
Private Collection, Japan
Sale, Christie's, New York, February 15, 1995, lot 288, illustrated
(acquired by the present owner at the above sale)
EXHIBITED

London, Royal Watercolor Society, 1908, no. 88
Possibly, Birmingham, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, 1909
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Jane Martineau, ed., Victorian Fairy Painting, exh. cat., London, Iowa City, Toronto, 1997, p. 144-45, no. 68, illustrated
Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, Boston, 1999, p. 243, illustrated
Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, England, 2000, p. 130, and p. 133, illustrated
Nicola Brown, Fairies in Nineteenth Century Art and Literature, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 69-70
CATALOGUE NOTE

This painting belongs to a traditional Victorian genre of fairies shown frolicking in their "natural" woodland environment. A ring of winged, plump, child-like creatures form around a young woman, perhaps a wood nymph. Holding a flute under her arms, her golden dress lifted, the woman poses as if she has been invited to perform a song -- her stage the loamy grass, her curtain the lush leaves of the trees, and her flood-lights the illuminated shells, flowers, and seed pods held aloft by her minature audience. In this mix of the natural and the supernatural, the theatrical and the real, Hughes fulfills the contemporary demand for fairy subjects while infusing the work with the artistic ideals of the late Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and British Romantic painters. First exhibited and adored at the Royal Watercolor Society in 1908, the painting transports the viewer into a world of sensual pleasures, yet does not deny a meticulous observation of nature and intricate painterly technique, providing an excuse for an onlooker's lengthy examination. A talented watercolorist, Hughes uses the medium to fill the surface with hazy, dreamlike swabs of saturated color, and employs more heavily bodied gouache to create shape and form, mixing the earth-bound with the light-hearted and playful. As such, he succeeds in creating a mood rather than a narrative (this is not a scene inspired by Shakespeare as Huskisson's, see lot 87) providing a peek into a world outside the troubles of mundane reality.