"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#FairytaleFriday: An Interior

The amazing Tatiana Fajardo posted this painting back on Xitter (go and follow her if you don’t) and I just couldn’t let it go.

The author is Alexander Davis Cooper, a British 19th-century painter born in 1820, and the painting is part of the Atkinson Art Gallery Collection. The work is dated 1867 and features a woman wearing a green hennin, the traditional Burgundian cone hat we nowadays associate with fairies.

Cooper painted landscapes, portrait and genre scenes from Shakespeare, but he also worked as a line engraver and illustrator of fairytales and animal tales such as Androcles and the Lion. Some of his engravings are preserved at the British Museum.
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