by The Curious Scribbler

Many children in the early twentieth century grew up hoping to glimpse a little magic on their country walks, imagination fuelled by picture books and stories offering an assortment of fairies, dwarves, leprechauns and other little people.  Fairy fever burgeoned in 1920 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  published two photographs of the Cottingley Fairies in the Christmas Edition of The Strand Magazine.  These early photographic fakes were the work of nineteen year old Elsie Wright, who had utilized her photographer father’s plate camera and her pretty little cousin to imaginative effect.   Such fairy fever also led to the work of Cicely Mark Barker, whose first book Flower Fairies of the Spring was published in 1923.  It and the following seven volumes entranced so many little girls.   This vicar’s daughter’s immaculate watercolour paintings each paired a botanically exquisite plant portrait with a beautiful child, costumed in clothing wrought out of  components of the flower. There were both boy and girl fairies, and it is said they were modelled on the children who were sent to her sister’s kindergarten.

Flower fairies have an enduring and entirely wholesome appeal.  When my daughters were growing up in the 1980s they were reinvented as a set of seven-inch costume dolls, less extravagantly leggy than Barbie, wearing clothing representing Briar Rose, Bluebell, Daffodil and so on.

Another early twentieth century artist, Jet S.Jardine, also placed her fairy people in the English (or perhaps the Scottish) countryside, but their world was a far more threatening place.  These little naked creatures shelter from the rain under mushrooms, are swept up in the wind, or cower at the hoot of an owl.

Patience under a Mushroom by J.S.Jardine

Quite Lost by J.S. Jardine

Dragonfly by JS Jardine

The nearest they come to comfort is when they play with caterpillars or shelter in a birds nest, but even here we are not certain whether the bird is about to evict them.

Full House by J.S Jardine

Jet Jardine called her creatures goblins – but they are too weak and vulnerable for most people’s idea of a goblin!  Goblins are defined  as malevolent  and hairy and usually around one foot tall.  Not the sort of creature to flinch from a spider on a windblown sycamore leaf.  When one of these pictures appeared on the market, the saleroom listed it as a Pixie, but I think pixies are generally mischievous and clothed. I would welcome suggestions as to where Jet’s creations fit in a classification of mythical humanoids.

Jet and her younger sister Aeta both studied at the Glasgow School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Watercolour Society and at Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions.  Almost completely forgotten today, they  lived together all their lives, in Scotland till 1920, and in London thereafter.   I hope their profile will rise again this autumn, when  a retrospective of their work will be exhibited in the Reid Gallery of the Glasgow School of Art.  These artists were my great aunts, and I plan to showcase their work, which spanned a number of different genres, by posting some more of their pictures in the next few blogs.