Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen

In the 1780s a London print seller, Thomas Macklin, was doing what several publishers had grown rich on: commissioning the best painters to illustrate England's poets, then selling engravings by subscription. Fuseli made this canvas for Macklin's Poets' Gallery around 1788. The subject comes from Spenser's Faerie Queene, where Prince Arthur tells of a dream. The Fairy Queen, Gloriana, lay beside him as he slept and was gone by morning, and he has wandered in search of her ever since. Fuseli was pulled to just this kind of moment, the mind on the threshold of sleep, and he once called dreams one of the least explored regions of art. Look at how he dressed his queen. Instead of medieval robes he gives Gloriana the towering powdered hair and thin, clinging costume of a fashionable Londoner of his own decade, with small spirits crowding the air around the sleeping prince.