Fitzgerald, John Anster
Fitzgerald, John Anster (1823–1906),known by his friends as ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’, Irish painter of highly original fantasy and fairy scenes. Little is known about his life and travels, but his grotesque goblin creations suggest that he must have been familiar with works by Brueghel and Bosch. It is also clear that his various ‘dream’ paintings refer to drug‐induced hallucinations. ‘The Artist's Dream’ (1857), for instance, shows an artist asleep, dreaming of the fairy he is painting, while in the foreground nightmare figures caper round his chair, one of them offering him a potion in a glass. In ‘Fairies in a Bird's Nest’ (c.1860) the two fairy figures are dwarfed by the menacing Bosch‐like aberrations that crowd the canvas.
Gillian Avery
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