Transatlantic Fairy Painting and Social Unrest in Victorian America

Fairy painting is a genre associated almost entirely with Victorian Britain; however, numerous artists from the United States engaged with fairy subjects in the 1860s and 1870s following a major exhibit of British art that traveled to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in 1857–58. This article is the first art historical consideration of American fairy painting. It examines two primary examples of the genre by John Ferguson Weir and James Farrington Gookins to argue that US fairy painting engaged with complex questions of racial and ethnic identity, transatlantic artistic influence, British folklore, and Pre-Raphaelitism. Suggesting that, as in Britain, the meanings of fairy paintings in the US were nuanced and sometimes contradictory, this article positions transatlantic Victorian fairy painting as a genre that engaged with discussions about social unrest and immigration in the post-Civil War US

Ethnic group · First world war · Immigration · Painting · Social unrest · Unrest · Weir · World War II · Geochemistry and Geologic Mapping · Geological Modeling and Analysis · Seismic Imaging and Inversion Techniques