The Fairy of the Fountain

The Fairy of the Fountain, painted in 1845 and now in the Tate Collection, is one of Etty's final exhibited works — a late career fairy painting that revisited one of his most commercially successful categories within the framework of his declining health and increasingly nostalgic artistic identity. By 1845 Etty was four years from his death, and his output was diminishing; this late fairy subject combines the supernatural figure painting that Victorian audiences tolerated with the lush woodland landscape that distinguished his late style from the more architectural settings of his earlier work. The Tate's holding of this work places it within the national collection's representation of Victorian British art alongside Etty's more celebrated earlier paintings. The fairy painting tradition — Shakespeare's Titania, Keats's lamia, the fairy mythology of British Romantic poetry — provided Etty and his contemporaries with a distinctively British genre that merged classical figure painting conventions with indigenous literary mythology.

The nude figure is set within a verdant landscape of flowing water and lush foliage. Etty's warm flesh tones and sensuous modeling demonstrate his command of the academic nude tradition.