ABSTRACT

The long nineteenth century was the golden era of fairy painting. One subset of this genre was the Victorian fairy-tale painting. The fairy-tale painting is far less ubiquitous than the fairy painting, but those that remain are extremely interesting to fairy-tale and visual scholars alike. As with the fairy tale in print media, the fairy-tale painting speaks to some of the era’s deepest, most abiding ideologies, fears, and desires. This chapter takes as a case study Edward Burne-Jones’s watercolor painting Cinderella (1863). Burne-Jones depicts elements of the familiar story of “Cinderella,” but also fills his background with the “willow-pattern” porcelain so popular in Victorian collections. In addition to capturing a specific moment in the fairy tale, then, the painting captures a moment in England’s emerging bourgeois and imperial narrative. In this way, Burne-Jones’s work can be situated in larger discourses both of the Victorian fairy tale and the vast mediascape it occupied.