Victorian artists painted some of the finest pictures of fairies, knights in armour, damsels and figures from folklore. Tonight's episode of The Victorians, the BBC series about 19th Century paintings, is all about them.
Called Dreams and Nightmares, it shows how artists in the final years of Queen Victoria's reign rebelled against materialistic and moral values by portraying England's mythological past and fantasy worlds of the imagination.
Presenter Jeremy Paxman will be meeting a pair of spiritualist mediums, visiting Broadmoor hospital to find out about artist and madman Richard Dadd and looking at Pre-Raphealite pictures.
Although this kind of art might not be as fashionable as it once was, I admit I love late Victorian pictures of fairies and I'll definitely be watching the programme tonight, at 9pm on BBC. If you miss it, it should be on iPlayer for at least another week.
2 comments:
I, too, love that style of art, but darn, the video won't play here in the U.S. Oh well, I still have my imagination!
Perhaps they will show the series in the US - although maybe not as it was mainly about Victorian England. The presenter, Jeremy Paxman, was looking at social, economic and industrial change through paintings of the era. In Dreams and Nightmares he looked at how late Victorian artists rejected materialism and industrialisation by painting mythological scenes and respecting skilled craftsmanship.
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