Joseph Noel Paton
1821–1901 · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland · Romanticism
The story
When Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician who wrote Alice in Wonderland, stood in front of Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, he did what a logician would and counted the fairies. He reached 165. Paton had packed the canvas, a scene from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a swarming crowd of tiny winged figures around the feuding fairy king and queen.
Paton was a Scot from Dunfermline, a linen town north of Edinburgh, and made his name young with two of these dense fairy pictures in the late 1840s. He owed the obsessive finish to his friendship with John Everett Millais, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, whom he had met as a student in London, though Paton kept to myth and fairy tale rather than following where they went.
In 1866 Queen Victoria made him her official painter in Scotland, the Queen's Limner. Both Oberon and Titania canvases now hang in the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the earlier one from 1847 and its stormier companion from 1849.
