Titania and the Fairies

Shakespeare's fairy queen Titania appears with her attendant sprites in this painting from around 1805, held at the Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust. Fairy painting was a distinctive British genre that flourished from the late eighteenth century, giving artists license to depict nude and semi-nude figures in fantastical settings without the moral objections provoked by contemporary nudity. For Etty, the subject offered an ideal vehicle for his flesh painting within an acceptable literary framework.

The fairy figures allow Etty to deploy his full range of flesh tones in diminutive scale, with the luminous quality of fairy skin suggesting supernatural radiance. The woodland setting is rendered with looser, more atmospheric brushwork that creates an enchanted environment. Warm golden light suffuses the scene, unifying the diverse figures and the natural setting.