This essay is dedicated to the work of John Anster Fitzgerald, especially his “dream paintings”, with particular attention to his painting “The Stuff that dreams are made of”. J. A. Fitzgerald’s other dream paintings include “The Captive Dreamer” (1856), “The Artist’s Dream” (1857), “The Nightmare” (c.1857-58), and a later oil-on-canvas version of “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of” (1858). These paintings, depicting dreamers (most of them girls) plagued by hideous creatures from the fairyland, are often considered a product of the painter’s drug-induced hallucinations, much like Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). It is not known for sure whether Fitzgerald himself used drugs (in general, little is known about Fitzgerald’s life beyond his works, but see below), though in his circle the use of opium as a recreational drug was quite common. However, my contention is that whether or not Fitzgerald’s work was indeed induced by opium, it goes far beyond depicting hallucinatory images. Hence, in this essay I wish to give a new look at these previously grossly underestimated paintings and show that they are indeed a deep and revealing study of human psyche.

Like the Victorian era itself, Fitzgerald’s dream paintings are full of internal contradictions. They are both characteristically Victorian and exceptionally modern. Fitzgerald attempts to peek into human mind and soul, thus being extraordinarily ahead of his own time, and yet he draws his goblin-like characters from old folk legends and myths. One of the major concerns of these paintings is the nature of human sexuality, and yet no explicit sexual images are used. Even the techniques in these paintings are diverse and almost mutually exclusive: a thin, almost water-colour quality of paint for the dream characters overlays the deep and intense brushstrokes used for the dreamer herself.

John Anster Fitzgerald’s life

Unfortunately, little is known about John Anster Fitzgerald’s life. Possibly, his diaries or one of his friend’s memoirs are still lying somewhere in a dusty Victorian attic waiting to be discovered. Here are the few facts that are known of the painter’s life.

John Anster Fitzgerald was born in London in 1823, during the reign of king George IV. He died also in London in 1906, five years after the demise of queen Victoria. Even though he was of Irish descent, he spent most of his life in London. Little is known about his formative years, but it appears that like many talented artists of his time, he got no formal training in drawing and painting, which – some might say – shows in his feeble attempts at portraying humans. Maybe this was one of the reasons why J. A. Fitzgerald was attracted to the topic of the fairyland.

Despite his lack of formal training, he became part of the art establishment, was a member of the Maddox Street Sketching Club, and from 1845 to 1902 he was exhibiting at the British Institution and at the Royal Academy. Although Fitzgerald is best known for his fairy paintings (most of which are now in private collections), he made a living as a portrait painter and illustrator; sometimes he also painted genre scenes. By 1850s he had become a regular contributor to the Illustrated London News, and in 1864 he was a candidate for the Society of British Artists.

Even though his father, a much ridiculed poet William Thomas Fitzgerald, died when John Anster Fitzgerald was young, he took after his father in many respects. For example, like his father John Anster was proud of his Irish descent, and often turned to Irish legends and folk tales for inspiration and motifs for his fairy and dream paintings. His was also a regular theatregoer, and his love of theatre must have contributed as well to his dramatic interpretation of his subjects. He was remembered by members of the Savage Club for his burlesque imitations of old-time actors and theatrical manager. He held his association with the Savage Club so dear that he left instructions in his will for his ashes to be kept there, but his wish was never fulfilled.

On the Victorian character of Fitzgerald’s dream paintings

In many ways, Fitzgerald’s dream paintings are deeply Victorian in nature. The subject matter of these paintings is part of general Victorian search for the Unseen, the movement that was largely influenced by the invention and development of photography. Even though dreams as such were a rare topic in Victorian painting (and certainly, in earlier art), the focus on the internal world rather than the external appearance of human subjects is typical of the Victorian visual art. One important part of the human inner world is sexuality. In the second half of the 19th century the issues related to human sexuality, hitherto largely taken for granted, were given an unprecedented attention. It is also characteristic that most of Fitzgerald’s dreamers are women. Until the Victorian times, women were seen mostly as men’s property, useful instruments in managing the household, and as a necessary part to the procreation. But in the Victorian times women have gradually acquired a new status, that of partners to men (not yet equal but still partners). It was no longer taken for granted that women are incapable of feelings other than romantic love and marital and maternal devotion. Rather, women were seen more and more as human beings with desires and needs no less complicated or important than men’s. Therefore, placing a woman under a psychological microscope the way Fitzgerald does in his dream paintings was inconceivable before the Victorian times.

Victorians and the passion for the Unseen

The Victorian era brought major changes to the role of art in society. In the earlier centuries, one of the major purposes of visual art (and especially, of the so called “higher genres” of historical painting and portraiture) was to record historical events and the appearance of important people for posterity. For example, historical and Biblical paintings were a way of recording and communicating to others the stories of real or imaginary events. Likewise, portraits were most often a way to record the appearance of a certain person to pass on to next generations. Rich people of high standing would have portraits of their daughters taken and sent to potential marriage candidates. Kings, emperors, and Popes used their portraits as symbols of their power.

However, the European invention of photography in 1839 changed the place of painting in European culture. Photography was seen as capable of making exact records of reality that were not only superior to older forms of image-making, such as painting, but also brought new possibilities to the visual media. Starting in the early 1840s, photographs were taken of newsworthy events, famous people and architectural sites. The world’s first illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, began publication in 1842. The technology to print photographs in a mass-circulation newspaper did not come until the end of the century, but photographs of newsworthy events could be copied by an engraver and so reproduced indirectly. From that time on, photographs were used extensively in information gathering, record-making and propaganda.

This invention of photography had a most lasting effect on what was considered the highest form of art at the time – the historical painting, whether of a religious, classical, or literary subject, or even of a contemporary event of national significance. The history painting “was not a documentary record but conveyed lasting moral truths, drawing out the universally significant characteristics of noble human endeavour from the circumstantial event” (C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 15). It is certain that Fitzgerald was familiar with the new invention of photography. By late 1850s, he became a regular contributor to the Illustrated London News, which published photographic images of current events. Fitzgerald shared with many other painters of his time the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography, and a wider fear of scientific discoveries and technological inventions. Instead of trying to compete with the objective eye of a photographic camera, Fitzgerald and his contemporaries developed a strong passion for looking for the Unseen. This passion gave rise to many varied movements in mid- to late 19th century painting.

One way of looking for the Unseen is to turn to an imaginary world. This is why so many Victorian painters left the real world behind them. Some, for example Richard Dadd and Charles Doyle (the father of the famous writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), did so quite literally – both of them ended up in a lunatic asylum. Even those who retained their sanity have immersed in the twilight worlds of Celtic and Germanic folk stories, classical and oriental mythology, medieval legends, Arthurian romances, Shakespearean woods near Athens, and Milton’s Paradise. This is one of the reasons for the rise of the fairy painting, which attempted to show the world where no humans can intrude, and which no human being or human-built camera can see. Thus, Fitzgerald’s fairy paintings, such as “The Fairies Banquet” (1859), “The Fairy Barque” (1860), “Fairies in a Bird’s Nest” (c. 1860), “The Chase of the White Mice” (c.1864), and “The Fairy Funeral” (1864), are all evocations of a secretive world of miniature fairies. Many of his works were illustrations for folk legends and nursery rhymes (the series on the capture, death and burial of Cock Robin being one characteristic example). These genres of oral literature appealed very heavily to the listener’s imagination.

Even when turning to true historical subjects, Victorian painters paid little attention to historical verisimilitude. Thus, Robert de la Sizeranne wrote of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (cited in J. Maas, Victorian Painters, The Cresset Press, 1969, p. 182):

His is not the Rome of David or of Poussin, of public ceremonies, famous actions, great events, which convulse the world around the echoing rostrums. Here we have everyday Rome, Rome as it appears in the letters of Cicero to Atticus, the life of antiquity as it felt in Terence or Plautus. For the present age, weary of great historical events, and famishing for anecdotes, this is the most interesting side of life, because it is most like our own.

Since the goal was not to depict historical events in their true detail, little attention was paid for such details as costume. For instance, Marcus Stone, who specialised in a fancy dress version of the Directoire period (and had an enormous success with it), paid little attention to the historical details of the clothes that were worn just after the French Revolution. Characters from Shakespeare’s plays were painted in every conceivable variety of pseudo-historical costume, from Ancient Greek togas to contemporary Victorian dress. Fitzgerald himself uses strange historical costumes in his dream paintings.

Many Victorian painters aimed at depicting human emotions. For example, Pre-Raphaelite painters often focused on depicting people torn by strong passions. The figures on their paintings are posed in such attitudes that imply that they are being torn by the most violent emotions, and yet the precise emotion is often left undefined. On the Continent, the search for emotions, whether those of the characters, the painter or the viewer, gave rise to the Impressionist movement. Back in England, James Whistler, who was influenced by the Impressionists, developed an original style totally opposed to that of Victorian anecdotal painting (e.g., Frith’s “Derby Day”) and the painstaking truth to nature of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He concentrated on the arrangement of tones and the musical quality of colour, calling his pictures symphonies, harmonies and nocturnes. In a way, one can see him as a predecessor of Kandinsky’s psychological theory of colour. Not only music could be depicted by Victorian painters looking for the Unseen. Thus, Sir John Everett Millais is said to be inspired for his “Autumn Leaves” (1856) by “the odour of burning leaves … the incense offered by departing summer to the sky…” (J. Maas, Victorian Painters, The Cresset Press, 1969, p. 129).

This passion for passions brought also some major changes to the other “higher genre” – the portraiture. Since the exactitude of the painter was surpassed by that of a camera, portrait painters started to look for emotional side of their sitters. For example, George Frederick Watts wrote of his experience during the work on portraits of Tennyson: “What I try for is the half unconscious insistence upon the nobilities of the subject” (cited in J. Maas, Victorian Painters, The Cresset Press, 1969, p. 201). Fitzgerald made his living as a portrait painter (in addition to his work as an illustrator). However, one can see that he was happier at painting fairies than humans. Fitzgerald’s early genre paintings and portraits with stiffly posed figures reveal his lack of formal training. But his vivid imagination allowed him to do what no formal training would have ever prepared him for. Instead of seeking exactitude and photographic resemblance, Fitzgerald attempts to show the inner world of the person he portrays. He is no longer interested in the “public persona”; instead, he looks for the inner world of emotions, thoughts and desires. As part of this search for the emotional inner world, he turned to the theme of dreams. Even though these dream paintings cannot be said to be portraits in the strict sense of the word, they are nevertheless collective portraits of the Victorian psyche.

Victorians and women

The title of this section may seem somewhat ridiculous: after all the term “Victorians” must refer to both men and women. Yet, the Victorian society was still predominantly male-oriented. The usual image of the Victorian society in the minds of our generation is the one where men and women had very different lifestyles. And largely this image is true. In the second half of the 19th century, men worked outside the home, while middle-class women stayed at home most of their lives and never worked outside the home if they could afford to. Men had access to education and vote, they owned property and ran most political institutions. Women’s education was limited to crafts, child-rearing and home-keeping; the only institutions they ran were their households and charities. An English businessman kept his wife and daughters in a gilded cage of the drawing-room where they spent their time dusting the innumerable “knickknacks” and “whatnots” and embroidering slippers and screens. Outside the family, women were walking exhibitions of their husband’s or father’s prosperity. The family being of utmost importance for the Victorians, a woman spent her life as an “obedient daughter” and then as a “dignified and fruitful wife” (J. Laver, Victoriana, Ward Lock & Co. LTD, 1966, p. 23).

And yet, a woman’s status in the Victorian society was no longer the same as in the previous decades. It is often said that a New Woman suddenly appeared on the social scene in the late 19th century. She played cricket, rode a bicycle (with her legs apart!), wore trousers, and aspired to work outside the home and to vote. However, this view is too naive: such major societal changes do not occur overnight. Even in the early Victorian days, women were given more freedom and power than their mothers and grandmothers. Queen Victoria herself set an admirable example of a strong-willed woman who ascended the throne at the age of 18 to preside over the largest empire the world has ever known, covering a quarter of the globe and encompassing 500 million people. Moreover, the devotion of the royal couple to each other, their unaffected pleasure in their children and their sense of public duty embodied the ideal of Victorian family life.

Importantly, the emancipation of women did not come from the women alone. Victorian men were as much responsible for the appearance of that New Woman as were women themselves. The proper role of women in society was one of the most hotly debated questions in the years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Even though a consensus was never reached,

a revolution in British property rights occurred when the law relating to married women was changed; new laws on divorce and child custody were enacted; and the educational prospects and work experience of all kinds of women were transformed. (cited in C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 1)

In the nineteenth century, women’s place in the society was understood through and reinforced by the doctrine of “separate spheres”: men were supposed to act in the “public sphere” of paid employment and political life, whereas women kept within the “private” or “domestic sphere” of home and family (and the term “public woman” was a euphemism for a prostitute). Even though this doctrine of separate spheres is most often seen as weakening women, it was in fact empowering them. The confinement of women to the “domestic sphere” gave them an unprecedented power in the moral, emotional, and educational domains. Even though most middle-class women did not work outside the home, their leisure was spent not in “self-indulgent frivolity”, but in assisting “more actively in the early, home-based stages of their children’s education”, “with particular responsibility for nurturing the moral foundations of their children’s behaviour”, and in “exercising a charitable, uplifting influence in the neighbourhood” (C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 3). The power women had in these domains is often underestimated. However, one should not forget that women’s right to vote and to participate in political life grew out of their involvement in charitable work, which in turn was seen as the extension of women’s role as family moral guardians and nurturers. Thus, the first public posts that women were elected for were School Boards, for which Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies stood successfully in 1871 in London, and Poor Law Boards, to which the first woman was elected in 1875 (L. Walker, “Vistas of pleasure: Women consumers of urban space in the West End of London 1850-1900”, in C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 71-74). Thus, women’s participation in charitable societies helped redefine what was considered “public” and what was considered “domestic”. Even though a slavish adherence to the precepts of “separate spheres” would not allow women to do so, it was largely acceptable for them to run fund-raising and speak in public on certain issues, such as the abolition of the slave-trade and of slavery, public heath matters, and education. These issues were redefined as essentially women’s issues in need of the values ascribed as feminine (C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 5).

In addition to their role as moral guardians in the family, women were considered as a cure for the ugliness and dehumanisation brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Men felt obliged to protect women from the ugly necessity to work outside the home, to be involved in sometimes cruel business relations. But on the other hand, it was the society of women they reverted to in their escapes from the daily toiling in the City. Thus, Bank Holiday Act was passed in 1871 to allow men to take a longer weekend holidays and to join their wives and children at summer resorts. In general, leisure time was usually spent in family outings, even though men also had their independent pursuits, such as sports, which women were generally banned from until the late 19th century.

One large part of the “private sphere” that women were restricted to was the domain of emotional life. In the 19th century, women were no longer viewed simply as property to be passed from father to husband. Romantic love started gaining more and more ground, as many a Victorian album would bear witness. Even though most marriages were still arranged by the parents of the bride and the groom, it became important for both men and women to come to know their future spouses before the wedding. Romantic love was as important for both young men and young women as was parental approval. On the whole, women were considered (probably, justifiably) as more prone to any kind of emotion than men. This was a development of the old Christian doctrine, going back to the story of the Primal Sin, that women are more vulnerable to temptations by the devil (this doctrine was also the underlying theme of massive persecution of women during witch hunts both in Europe and later in America). In fact, women were encouraged to express their emotions overtly, whereas men were (and still are) taught to suppress their emotions at all costs. It was assumed that emotions have no place in the world of business, a theory than many contemporary businesswomen disprove by their own examples.

Whatever the source of women’s higher emotionality, it was recognised in the Victorian era, and the Victorian art reflected this changing attitude towards women’s emotional world. Many Victorian painters exhibit a new approach to depicting women. Women are no longer depicted as just beautiful property of their fathers or husbands, but rather as vessels filled with emotions. Consider these following two female portraits: “Beata Beatrix” (1872) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and “Miss Cecily Alexander: Harmony in Grey and Green” (1872-74) by James Whistler. However different these paintings look to us, there is a unifying quality to them. Both paintings depict a woman in a highly emotional state. “Beata Beatrix” is a portrait of the artist’s wife completed after her untimely death. Rossetti was deeply in love with his wife, and some of the emotions that exude from her face, her posture, her hands may be ascribed to the feelings of anguish and remorse that Rossetti himself felt following his wife’s death (she died from an overdose of opium that he first introduced her to). But these are also clearly her emotions, her piety, her passion, her temptation. “Miss Cecily Alexander: Harmony in Grey and Green” by Whistler was painted about the same time as Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix”; yet, it is a very different painting. Even though Whistler was interested as much in the interplay of colours as he was in the character of his subject, the emotions of Miss Cecily Alexander are unmistakable. After numerous sittings that Whistler insisted upon, she is clearly frustrated, tired, hurt. And yet, she is a girl of an exceptionally strong character, stubborn no less than the painter himself, as her pose clearly indicates.

Since the new light was shed on the emotional lives of Victorian women by artists that depicted them, it is not at all surprising that Fizgerald has chosen female subjects for his dream paintings. (All but one of these paintings feature female dreamers.) The goal of these dream paintings was an exploration of the inner world of the dreamer, and therefore women with their rich emotional lives made best candidates for dream paintings. Fitzgerald’s dreamers are wrought with strong emotions, whether pleasant or not. Moreover, the content of their dreams is largely within the “private sphere” that Victorian women were restricted to. The main themes in these dreams are courtship, romantic love and marriage.

Victorians and the human sexuality

Another way in which Fitzgerald’s dream paintings capture the essence of the Victorian era is in their subtle references to human sexuality. This topic became much more central in the Victorian collective mind than it has ever been before. It was the Victorians who invented the concept of homosexuality and re-invented the myth about masturbation, creating guilt feelings in many a young mind. It was the Victorians who began to discuss the sex lives of the “rich and famous” in public media (the Parliament’s inquiry of 1820 into an alleged Italian affair of Caroline of Brunswick, George IV’s wife, can be seen as a predecessor of this public interest in the sex life of the royal family). Queen Victoria’s romantic love to Prince Albert and their marriage were always in the centre of public attention. And yet, it was also the Victorians who were so embarrassed by the topic of sexuality that they had a strange urge to cover their furniture, “as if it were somehow improper for tables as well as ladies to show their legs” (J. Laver, Victoriana, Ward Lock & Co. LTD, 1966, p. 185). In the same vein, Victorians saw it as highly improper for a woman to ride on the top deck of a bus, where her ankles may become occasionally exposed to view. It was the Victorians who invented so many euphemisms for sexually-related anatomy, including the famous “white meat” and “dark meat”.

To reflect the general Victorian shyness in sexual matters, Fitzgerald does not make explicit references to sexuality in his dream paintings. Rather, he uses a far less obvious sexual symbolism. Importantly, there is no nudity in “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of”. This makes a startling contrast to many Victorian paintings whose authors chose Ancient Greece or Rome as setting for the paintings only to have a chance to introduce nudity into them. Interestingly, in his fairy paintings – where sexuality appears not to be such an important topic – Fitzgerald used a more explicit sexual imagery, including such common symbols as a mushroom (see “The Fairies’ Banquet” of 1859) and a water lily (see “The Fairies’ Barque” of 1860). Even compared to an earlier dream painting “The Nightmare” (c. 1857-58), later paintings, such as “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of”, are more toned down. One of the most obvious references to the female reproductive cycle in “The Nightmare” – the brilliant red sash flowing down the side of the bed with the fringe touching the floor and “looking like a wound with a pool of blood running down” – has been removed from “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of” (J. Maas et al., Victorian Fairy Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997, p. 116).

Still, Fitzgerald makes many subtle hints at the sexual nature of the girl’s dream in “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of”. One such hint is the full moon in the window. Even though in this painting the moon is far smaller and less central than in the “The Nightmare”, it is still the source of light in the painting. The moon rays light up the central element in the dream – the couple (the dreamer and her lover) standing under a mistletoe. Even tough mistletoe was once believed to have medicinal properties, later a custom developed in England of kissing under the mistletoe, which action was believed to lead inevitably to marriage. Indeed, the painting is full of references to marriage. This is not at all surprising since for Victorians sexuality and love were tightly connected to marriage and child-bearing. Even Valentine cards – symbols of love – often bore pictures of churches, sometimes with doors that would open to show a wedding ceremony going on inside the church. A good marriage was considered to be the pinnacle of a woman’s life.

But for Victorians, the woman was no longer just a passive participant on the marital bed. It was recognised that women have sexual feelings too, and Fitzgerald’s paintings reflect that. Even though the central element in the dream is the couple standing under the mistletoe, this is not the only image that the girl has of herself in the dream. There are four additional images of the same girl in the same blue jacket. In these episodes of the dream the girl is being chased by the goblins or dancing with her lover. This episode of dancing with the lover is very suggestive: the couple and the goblins all around the picture appear in poses from traditional folk dances, which derive from old fertility rituals where mimed (or even actual) motions of sexual intercourse were enacted. One motif in particular, the fertility leap, in which the male dancer lefts the woman as high as he can, is common to many courtship dances, from the Tyrolean Schuhplattler to more formal waltzes and polkas popular in Victorian England.

Another motif in the dream commonly associated with sexual activities is the musical instruments. In the forefront of the painting by the side of the bed, five goblin-like creatures play different musical instruments. In the symbolic language of medieval and later paintings, musical instruments were used to signify lust and sexual pleasure. For example, Bosch places musical instruments in his representation of lust in “The Seven Deadly Sins”. In addition to his use of musical instruments to symbolise sexual aspects of love, Fitzgerald depicted two of the goblins by the girl’s side as touching her in a very sexual manner, massaging her breast and thigh. Moreover, the girl in this painting does not appear to be tormented by the dream (once again, unlike the girl in “The Nightmare”). On the contrary, she is sleeping peacefully. She does not writhe in anguish on her bed like the heroines in Fitzgerald’s and Fuseli’s nightmare paintings; her cheeks are rosy but are not feverish, and her lips appear to be ready to spread in a smile. All this suggests that Fitzgerald – and Victorians in general – saw sexuality not only as instrumental to reproduction but also as a pleasurable activity, not only for men but also for women.

Like the Victorian attitude to sexuality, Fitzgerald’s depiction of the girl’s sexual desires is full of contradictions. The doctrine of “separate spheres” and the high morality standards for women are highlighted by the contradictory image of the dreamer: a wreath, the symbol of purity and chastity, crowns a head of spread out hair, which symbolises the temptation and the fall. Since the girl is fully dressed (in a historic costume that is so elaborately painted by Fitzgerald), it is unexpected that her hair be loose. It was an important part of a nineteenth century woman’s morning toilet to have her hair brushed and arranged in a complex hairdo around the head (recall the many Impressionist paintings depicting such scenes). This process took a good part of a woman’s morning and was performed before the dress was put on. At night, the dress would be taken off first and then the hair would be loosened and brushed again. In Victorian culture (like in so many others around the globe and at different times), to show loose hair was the ultimate impropriety for a woman. Even in many nude paintings from the Victorian epoch, women are depicted with their hair tied up. Loose hair was seen as a symbol of loose morals; only a prostitute would wear her hair loose. In striking contrast to the loose hair is a wreath of white flowers, a symbol of purity and innocence. It would be worn by a bride at her wedding ceremony. So who is this dreaming girl: a morally decadent whore or a pure virgin? For Fitzgerald, she is both. Victorians in general viewed a woman as both the epitome of the original sin and the ultimate symbol of beauty. This shows what a strange combination of Romantic ideals and stifling religious dogma lies at the heart of the Victorian ethics. Thus, “the visual representations of respectable versus ‘fallen’ women helped to reinforce these constructions of Victorian femininity and contribute to their ideological power” (C. Cambell Orr, Women in the Victorian art world, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 4).

Fitzgerald’s explorations of the dream world

Despite the typical characteristics of a Victorian art work, Fitzgerald’s dream paintings are in a way revolutionary. Until then, dreams have been “one of the most unexplored regions of art”, as Henry Fuseli put it. Fitzgerald, like Columbus, was the first to embark on an exploration of an unknown and dangerous terrain. But in his case, it was the terra incognita of dreams. Like Columbus, he followed the guidance of a long-forgotten ancient ideas (in the case of Fitzgerald, the ideas of Aristotle and Cicero). Like Columbus, Fitzgerald did not become famous overnight; his works brought him neither large sums of money nor world-fame. His contemporaries did not appreciate the originality of Fitzgerald’s paintings, and many a later critic dismissed them as products of opium-induced hallucinations. But surely enough, in the years to follow the land of dreams was invaded by both scientists and artists.

On the nature of dreams

Since the dawn of civilisation mankind has always attached great importance to dreams; however, conceptions of their source and significance have changed tremendously over the centuries and from a place to a place. Two major conceptions of dreams can be distinguished: dreams as divine revelation and dreams as a reflection of the dreamer’s mind and soul. The conception of dreams are a divine gift has been very popular in both European and non-European cultures. The purpose of such divine gift was seen as providing clues to events that are beyond human physical perception, either because of the limitations of physical space or the limitations of time. Ethnographers and anthropologists record many cases of customs related to dreams. For example, there is a tradition in Borneo that if a man dreams that his wife is an adulteress, her father must take her back, thus annulling the marriage. A Zulu man is said to have broken off a friendship after dreaming that the friend meant him harm. A Paraguayan Indian, reportedly having dreamed that a missionary shot at him, attempted to kill the missionary. The common thread in all these stories is that people consider dreams as clues to the reality they themselves cannot witness.

In many other cultures, dreams are interpreted as prophetic revelations about the future. This view has been widely held throughout the Ancient Middle East: the Chester Beatty Papyrus is a record of Egyptian dream interpretations dating from the 12th dynasty (1991-1786 BC). In the Iliad, Agamemnon is visited in dream by a messenger of the god Zeus to prescribe his future actions. A Babylonian dream guide was discovered in the ruins of the city of Nineveh among tablets from the library of the emperor Ashurbanipal (668-627 BC). Among pre-Islamic peoples dream divination so heavily influenced daily life that the practice was formally forbidden by Muhammad, founder of the Muslim religion. The prophetic power of dreams is often associated with their curative power. For instance, in classical Greece, dreams became directly associated with healing; ailing people came to dream in oracular temples where priests and priestesses advised about the cures dreams were held to provide. Similar practices, known as dream incubation, are recorded for Babylon and Egypt.

The Old Testament is rife with prophetic dreams. The story of Joseph interpreting the pharaoh’s dreams, related in Genesis 40-41, is particularly striking. Joseph, imprisoned at the time, is asked to interpret the dreams of his two fellow inmates, the cup-bearer and the baker. His reply summarises the view that the people of the Bible had of dreams; he says “Do not interpretations belong to God?” (Genesis 40:8). The officers relate their respective dreams, which are interpreted by Joseph as forecasting the return of the cup-bearer to the pharaoh’s court and the execution of the baker. In three days time, as predicted by Joseph, the cup-bearer is restored to his office and the baker is hanged. Despite the cup-bearer’s forgetfulness, Joseph is called upon by the pharaoh to interpret the weird dreams that he has had, first about seven fat cows swallowed by seven lean cows and then about seven good ears of corn swallowed by seven lean ears of corn. No magician or wise man in Egypt could interpret the dream, and Joseph is called upon to show his dream-interpretation art. Joseph dutifully interprets the dreams as predicting seven good years followed by seven years of drought and famine. Armed with this divine warning, the pharaoh selects Joseph to oversee the preparations for the seven years of famine. Joseph proves very successful at the task, which allows Egypt to survive the famine that affected the whole of Middle East, exactly as predicted. This story teaches two important morals: dreams are divine prophesies sent by the benevolent God to avert a possible disaster, and the art of interpreting dreams is one of the most powerful tools a man can possess. Thus, Joseph’s life is transformed overnight from that of a prisoner to that of the foremost man in Egypt next only to the pharaoh. This story is most crucial to the understanding of the view that dreams are a divine revelation.

A very different view of dreams associates them with internal psychological reality of the dreamer. Even in early human history dreams were interpreted as reflections of emotional needs. For instance, Aristotle (384-322 BC), despite his contemporaries who practised divination and incubation, in his work Parva Naturalia (“On the Senses and Their Objects”) attributed dreams to sensory impressions from “external objects … pauses within the body … eddies … of sensory movement often remaining like they were when they first started, but often too broken into other forms by collision with obstacles.” In anticipation of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Aristotle wrote that sensory function is reduced in sleep, favouring the susceptibility of dreams to emotional subjective distortions. Despite Aristotle’s influence, this view was not very popular in European Christian culture, which absorbed the Old Testament view of dreams as prophetic. In spite of Aristotle's unusually modern views and even after a devastating attack by the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) on dream divination (De divinatione; "On Divination"), views that dreams have supernatural attributes persisted vigorously until about 1850s. Only the 19th century brought a change in the perception of dreams. Talbot W. Chambers, writing in 1880 a commentary to Gustav Dore’s illustrations of the Bible, summarised the decline of “dream as divine revelation” view in these words:

… God, of course, may impart information in this way [i.e., through dreams]; but, that he does not, is admitted by all careful observers of divine providence and human experience. It is true that there have been cases in which remarkable dreams have been followed by corresponding occurrences in actual life; but they who note this forget that there are very many cases in which no such correspondence ensues.

Instead of being treated as divine revelations, dreams are now viewed as reflections of human mind and soul. In his classic work, the French physician Alfred Maury, who studied more than 3,000 reported recollections of dreams, concluded that dreams arose from external stimuli, instantaneously accompanying such impressions as they acted upon the sleeping person. He wrote that part of his bed once fell on the back of his neck and woke him, leaving the memory of dreaming that he had been brought before a French revolutionary tribunal, questioned, condemned, led to the scaffold, and bound by the executioner, and that the guillotine blade had fallen. Many famous 19th century thinkers have reported that their best creative work was envisaged in their dreams. For example, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) reported that he had written “Kubla Khan” as the result of creative thinking in a dream. Having fallen asleep while reading about that Mongol conqueror, he woke to write down a fully developed poem he seemed to have composed while dreaming. Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) said that much of his writing was developed by “little people” in his dreams, and specifically cited the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in this context. The Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907) wrote that the periodic classification of elements came to him a dream, and the German chemist F.A. Kekule von Stradonitz (1829-1896) attributed his interpretation of the ring structure of the benzene molecule to his dream of a snake with its tail in its mouth.

This view that dreams reflect waking experience and the psychological reality of the dreamer’s mind has found its climax in the writings of Sigmund Freud, and most notably in his The Interpretation of Dreams (1899). He offered a theoretical explanation for the bizarre nature of dreams, invented a system for their interpretation, and elaborated on their curative potential. For him, dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious”, and this is the road that John Anster Fitzgerald depicted so vividly in his dream paintings.

Sleep and dream in pre-Victorian art

Even though pre-Victorian artists often depicted sleeping persons, dreams as such had remained “one of the most unexplored regions of art” (H. Fuseli; cited in J. Maas et al., Victorian Fairy Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997, p. 110). Most of pre-Victorian images of dream are illustrations of the Old Testament stories of Jacob’s dreaming and of the pharaoh’s dreams interpreted by Joseph. In the illustrations of the latter story, the dreams themselves are not depicted, the narrative being centred on Joseph’s appearance at the pharaoh’s court to relate the meaning of the dreams and on the power relations between the pharaoh and Joseph. For example, in Gustav Dore’s illustrations, Joseph, brought to interpret the weird dreams, is depicted as standing beneath the pharaoh’s throne, which stands in the visual centre of the illustration. This is representative of Joseph’s lower status – at this stage, he is still a prisoner. The next illustration shows Joseph dressed in royal-like garments; now, he is depicted in the visual centre of the illustration, which symbolises his rise to power in Egypt.

The story of Jacob’s dream is more illuminating for a study of the imagery of dream in pre-Victorian art. This story is told in Genesis 28:10-17:

And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it… (Genesis 28:12)

Just as the ladder appears to connect the earth and the heavens, the dream itself is interpreted by Jacob as a divine revelation connecting him to God: “This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” As a result of this revelation, he shows a renewed faith in the power of God and promises to keep the religion of his forefathers.

The illustrations depicting this story are very characteristic of the pre-Victorian depictions of dreams. There is a clear distinction between the domain of the reality (sleeping Jacob being the most central part of it) and the domain of the dream (in this case, the ladder and the angels on it). The two domains are separated visually, with the dream domain always being at the top of the painting, above the domain of the dreamer. This positioning of the two domains is indicative of the view of dreams as divine revelations: dreams are depicted on the heavens because of their heavenly nature.

The second important point about the depictions of dream in the pre-Victorian painting is that the emotional state of the dreamer is de-emphasised. In fact, the dreamer usually looks not much different from a dead person. For example, Jacob is represented as lying down with his eyes closed. The only difference between the depictions of a dead and a sleeping person are in that death is presented as more unnatural than sleep. Dead persons are often depicted as having a unnatural, bluish skin colour and reposing in unnatural, twisted positions. In all other respects, death and sleep are presented similarly. Interestingly, even in the depictions of a dreaming person, such as the illustrations of Jacob’s dream, the presence of a dream does not make the sleeper any more alive; Jacob is depicted as a lifeless figure, the spiritual centre of the illustrations always corresponding to the divine domain of the dream.

Sleep and dream in early Victorian Painting (18th - 19th c.)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imagery of sleep and dream received a renewed attention in art, in particular in painting. Many Victorian Fairy painters depicted scenes of sleep and dream. Yet, most of these paintings are illustrations of scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This interest of Victorian painters in the play is not accidental. The first half of the 19th century saw an enormous revival of interest in the fairyland in general and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in particular. In 1811, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque wrote Undine, and in 1856 the subject of a watery nymph was picked up by a Russian composer Alexander Sergeevich Dargomyzhsky, who was inspired by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin’s dramatic poem to write his opera Rusalka. In 1827, Maria Taglioni stormed London in the ballet “Zephyr and Flora” with her airy style of dance combined with a shorter and lighter costume, which have inspired further productions of fairy ballets. (In all fairness, it should be noted that Maria Taglioni was not the first ballerina to go “on points”. There are records of Russian ballerinas at St. Peterburg ballet dancing on points in Didlot’s production of “Zephyr and Flora” as early as 1808, when Maria Taglioni was only four years old. But Maria Taglioni’s lack of dramatic talent and her strong legs and natural grace made her father, choreographer Philip Taglioni, built his choreography on attitudes, arabesques, pirouettes and jumps that Maria was so good at, and that forged the connection of her name with this new style of dance.) In 1842, Felix Mendelssohn composed his famous music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These are only a few examples of the appearance of the fairy kingdom in music and performance arts.

Even though classical plays were not very popular with suburban English theatres where “blood and thunder” melodramas were the most popular entertainment, the famous Shakespearean critic Thomas De Quincey, writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1830s, singled out A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the favourite English play and noted that

in no other exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and forest lawns, are the circumstantial properties of fairy life so exquisitely imagined, sustained or expressed. (cited in J. Maas, Victorian Painters, The Cresset Press, 1969, pp. 152-153)

This play became part of the revival of nearly all Shakespeare’s plays started in 1844 with a production of Macbeth by a well-known actor Samuel Phelps in Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Islington. The 1853 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was particularly praised by the contemporary critic Henry Morley for its spell-bounding special effects. Part of the magic of the mid-19th century productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were the newly discovered possibilities created by gas lighting. Londoners were introduced to the marvels of gas light in 1804 by demonstration in Liceum Theatre, given by Frederick Albert Winsor, a flamboyant German-born businessman, and by 1840s much of London was illuminated with gas lamps. In theatre, gas lighting allowed to light stage scenery more brilliantly, flexibly and steadily, and to achieve the subtle effects of changing times of day and the moonlight. Even though it was a common practice to keep the auditorium well lit throughout the performance, the effects of gas lighting were mesmerising. It is clear that these productions had an inspiring effect on Victorian artists. Among them was Robert Huskisson, whose paintings of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tempest, framed with proscenium arches decorated with sculptural figures in shallow relief, are very much suggestive of theatre.

Thus, much of the Victorian fairy painting has been inspired by Shakespearean plays and their productions in Sadler’s Wells Theatre, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Countless painters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries took imagery from the play for their subject matter, including William Etty, William Blake, George Romney, Henri Fuseli, John Lamb, David Scott, Richard Dadd, Robert Huskisson, Richard Simmons, Sir Joseph Noel Paton, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Even though Shakespeare has woven four separate subplots into one play, the number of scenes that were illustrated in the 18th and 19th centuries is quite limited. The most popular character is by far the fairy queen Titania, who is painted either dancing with her fairies, or sleeping, or awakening to fall in love with Bottom. Second after Titania come Oberon and Puck, the two characters responsible for the mishaps in the fairy woods near Athens (cf., Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s “Oberon and the Mermaid” (1883) and Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Puck”). But interestingly, there is one dream image in the play that has not been illustrated by early Victorian painters. I am referring to Hermia’s dream that she relates to us on her awakening in the enchanted woods (Act 2, Scene 2). As she wakes up of her celibate sleep in the woods side by side with Lysander, Hermia cries for help:

Help me, Lysander, help me; do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast.

She then realises that the image she saw of “a serpent eat[ing] [her] heart away” was a mere dream, but then she comes to a more frightening realisation that her lover, Lysander, has abandoned her, in a way making the prophesy of the dream that he “sat smiling at [the serpent’s] cruel prey” into reality.

The lack of interest in this particular scene in the play is telling. This is the only dream which, unlike other dreams and surrealistic happenings of the play, is presented as dreamt by a human being and not part of the imaginary world of the fairy kingdom. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the conception of dreams as a divine gift was still prevalent in the European culture. Dreams were viewed as sent by gods, whether by the Christian God, as in the Biblical stories, or by the folk mythical creatures, including the inhabitants of the fairy kingdom. Thus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon and Puck have the power to affect people’s dreams as well as their emotions once they wake up. The view of dreams as a reflection of the dreamer’s inner world was not yet very popular. And the little scene of Hermia’s recalling her frightening dream is most naturally interpreted in exactly that way. The sexual image of a serpent relates to Hermia’s insistence earlier in that scene on Lysander’s sleeping “further off… not… so near” her. This is a dream that is clearly a reflection of Hermia’s desire to share her bed with Lysander, which she in her assumed modesty refuses to do.

Crucially, there is no divine flavour to Hermia’s dream; it is purely a reflection of her inner world, her lust for Lysander and her fear of intimacy. Even though Shakespeare includes this scene in the play, it is far from being central to the plot, with the emphasis being on the divine and fairy nature of dreams. This, I think, is the reason why the scene of Hermia’s dream has not been depicted by early Victorian painters, who were mostly interested in the relationship between fairyland and dreamland. These two are often seen as interwoven in an inseparable spider net of the Unseen.

One example of such painting is Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s “The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania” (1847). In this painting, the fairy world and the human world are completely intermingled. The lovers appear as Gulliverian creatures in the fairyland. The dream is seen as the reality in which the lovers (part of the real world) are an intrusion. As noted by Jeremy Maas, this panting symbolises “the awakening Victorian fascination with the sub-conscious” (J. Maas, Victorian Painters, The Cresset Press, 1969, p. 152). Yet, there is still little interest in the inner world of the dreamers. The sleeping lovers are depicted as deeply asleep and hardly affected by the miraculous fairy world around them. In fact, the multitude of fairies swarming in the forest may be interpreted as part of the lovers’ dream or as a product of the reader’s (or spectator’s) imagination.

Another interesting example of early Victorian dream paintings are Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1782) and “The Shepherd’s Dream” (1793). Unlike many other early Victorian painters, Fuseli ventures to study what he called “one of the most unexplored regions of art” without the guiding map of the Shakespearean A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The later painting, “The Shepherd’s Dream”, is an illustration for a scene from John Milton’s Paradise Lost which speaks of

fairy elves,
whose midnight revels by a forest side,
or fountain some belated peasant sees,
or dreams he sees.

In this painting, Fuseli portraits the dreaming shepherd, while above him floats a vision of dancing fairies emerging from the darkness. With linked arms and rhythmic forms, echoed in the flowing folds of their clothes, they dominate the space over the hooded, slumbering shepherd. In addition to “The Shepherd’s Dream”, Fuseli also painted two works called “The Nightmare”, both depicting a girl spread over her bed tortured by a nightmare. The two characters symbolising the nightmare are a goblin and a horse (an unintended pun on “night-mare”?).

In many respects, these paintings remind one of later paintings by John Anster Fitzgerald; however, in many other respects, they are very different from Fitzgerald’s works. Even though Fuseli seems to be interested more in the subconscious nature of dreams than in their divine revelation potential, he still uses the imagery and the symbolic language of earlier painters. As in pre-Victorian depictions of dreams, Fuseli restricts the dream world to a domain in the upper half of the painting, above the domain of the real world. The two domains are sharply divided; there seems to be no interaction between the worlds of the dream and the dreamer. For example, in “The Shepherd’s Dream” the fairies dancing above the shepherd are looking below and one of the fairies appears to try to touch the shepherd, but she does not succeed. Only the shepherd’s dog looks up at the fairies, possibly sensing the presence of non-human beings with its sharp animal sense of smell.

In Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” the domains of the dream and the real world appear to be separated not only on the vertical axis but also in the three-dimensional space: the nightmarish characters of the horse and the goblin are deeper in space, while the girl is right at the forefront of the painting. The only part of the horse visible for the viewer is its head, appearing from behind the curtain at the back of the painting. In both version of “The Nightmare” the source of light is positioned in such a way as to light the girl, not the dream characters. The whole composition of the painting reminds of a theatrical set with the protagonist, the girl, in the limelight at the front of the stage and the dream characters at the back, peeping through the backdrop curtain. On the whole, the imagery of Fuseli’s dream paintings is not as rich as in Fitzgerald’s dream paintings.

In startling contrast to earlier depictions of dreaming, Fitzgerald uses the symbolic power of the composition to express a very different message. In his dream paintings, especially in “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of”, there is no clear spatial divide between the domain of the dream and the domain of the reality. Unlike the earlier artists, Fitzgerald does not place the dream scenes at the top of the painting, symbolising the heaven. Rather, the dream surrounds the dreamer, or else emanates from her. The goblin-like creatures appear to dance around the dreaming girl. Even the household items – the chair, the curtain, and the bed itself, which are presumably part of the world of reality – become involved in this fairy-circle of sorts.

Unlike many earlier painters of dream subjects, Fitzgerald uses the colours and the paint-laying technique to distinguish the two worlds: the dream world and the real world. This is very much reminiscent of technique used by medieval Russian icon painters, such as the masters from the schools of Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev, especially in their depictions of the Dormition of Mary, where the two events – the death of Mary surrounded by apostles, on the one hand, and the taking of her soul by Christ, on the other hand – happen simultaneously and in the same location, but the former event takes place in the real space, whereas the latter – in the mystical space. To depict the “fourth dimension” of the mystical space, the icon painters use the contrasts in color: the heavenly background of the real space is depicted with the usual (for Russian icons) golden color, whereas the background of the mystical space is depicted in dark blue (B. Raushenbakh, Prostranstvennye postroenija v zhivopisi. Ocherk osnovnykh metodov, Moscow, Nauka, 1980, pp. 150-159). Similarly, in Fitzgerald’s “The Stuff that Dreams are Made of”, the objects that form the real world are painting with deep, dramatic colours – reds, purples, blues and greens. In contrast, the goblins and the other scenes from the dream are painted as overlays, with thin pale colours and almost Impressionists’ brushstrokes. In fact, they seem to be drawn then painted. This gives the dream world of the painting a certain dim, mysterious quality, perhaps stemming from the fact that many dreams cannot be recollected on awakening. It also creates an association with death, thus tying together the three realms: the dream world, the fairy kingdom and the land of the dead. This association is not new. In the folk legends, the fairy kingdom is associated both with the land of the dead (for example, the fairyland was often placed underground, like the mythical Hades, and it was common to associate the location of the fairy kingdom with burial sites) and with the realm of the unconscious, the dream world in which anything can happen.