THOMAS BROMLEY BLACKLOCK | In the Fairies' Wood

Sale: Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, August 30, 1983, lot 856, illustrated
Sale: Sotheby’s, Gleneagles, September 1, 1992, lot 958, illustrated
Acquired at the above sale

Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1904, no. 159

This charming and imaginative scene of a wandering girl’s meeting with a gnome reflects the insatiable Victorian appetite for storytelling and depictions of fairies and other mythical beasts in popular culture. Thomas Bromley Blacklock was trained in Edinburgh but returned to his hometown of Kirkcudbright, which lies on the south west coast of Scotland, where the artist "developed into a painter of fairy-tales. He painted pleasant tender fancies expressed with a daintiness of colour and design and an ingenuity and quaintness in costume and accessory" (Peter J. M. McEwan, Dictionary of Scottish Art & Architecture, Suffolk, 1994, p. 77). The present work may be inspired by local Galloway folklore as well as the work of Scottish colorist and member of the Glasgow Boys E. A. Hornel (1864-1933), who led the Kirkcudbright Artists’ Colony, an answer to England’s St. Ives School, which flourished into the mid-twentieth Century.