On our wedding anniversary last week Sheila gave me a charming card with this cover design. An apt choice because I’d been chasing butterflies in the garden for days – without much success! Getting good photographs of butterflies is hard - sketching them even harder. I persevered hoping to find new wildlife subjects to paint.
Nowadays figurative wildlife art is very much concerned with accurate objective representation. This design taken from a 19th century lithograph is an expression of romantic fantasy. The title of the lithograph is ‘The Fairy Queen’s Carriage’. The complete lithograph shows an airborne Fairy Queen sitting on a stalk of apple blossom drawn along by the butterflies.
We’re off to Stratford tomorrow to see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ back to enjoy Shakespeare’s fairy queen this time.
The artist is Richard Doyle 1824-1883 and the lithograph is part of The Stapleton Collection/The Bridegman Art Library.
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