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Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of

Dreamed 1857? (painted 1858) by John Anster Fitzgerald

Fairy painting by John Anster Fitzgerald, 1858: 'The Stuff that Dreams are Made of'. Click to enlarge.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I like Fitzgerald--the glassy, delicate energy-beings he paints look a bit like the energy fields around living creatures that I 'see'--except of course it's not sight but a quite separate sense. Did he imagine this stuff, or see it? Was he just naturally weird or did he do a lot of drugs? A couple of paintings refer to opium dens.

He painted a whole series titled The Dream or The Artist's Dream or Stuff of Dreams etc (he was vague about titles; I saw three for this version alone). He may have made the whole scene up, but my best guess is he dreamt that fairies and spirits filled his study, woke and painted it fairly straight, but then in successive variants turned his snoozing bearded self into a girl, getting prettier & more Pre-Raphaelite with each version. More salable!

I'd email him to ask, but...

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: image from Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: the illustrated Version, p.354; bio data from Wikipedia; date and variant titles from multiple art sites.



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