The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania

Victorian Britain was gripped by fairy painting, and few pictures pushed it further than this. Paton crowds his canvas with a host of tiny fairy figures, some lovely and some grotesque, swarming around Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, who are quarrelling over a stolen human child. There are so many small figures that when the writer Lewis Carroll saw the painting he sat and counted them, reaching 165. It was judged the picture of the season when shown in Edinburgh in 1850, and a few years later it travelled to the Paris Exhibition of 1855 as a representative of British art. The supernatural setting also let Paton paint a sensuality that a more ordinary subject could never have carried.