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John Simmons (1823 – 1876) was a little known British artist who worked as a portrait and miniature painter, but is best known for his work painting fairy scenes especially from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. From Bonhams: Fairy painting was a genre which found a renewed popularity in the 19th century, these mystical worlds granting the viewer an escape from reality and solace from the hardships of Victorian life. As Jeremy Maas commented, ‘no other type of painting concentrates so many of the opposing elements in the Victorian psyche: the desire to escape the dreary hardships of daily existence; the stirring of new attitudes towards sex, stifled by religious dogma; a passion for the unseen; psychological retreat from scientific discoveries; the birth of psychoanalysis; the latent revulsion against the exactitude of the new invention of photography.’ […] Using the winding flowers and convolvulus as a decorative motif, Simmons romantically frames the central figures, creating a s
