The Making of Modern Fantasy in the Visual Arts of England, c. 1850-1920

There has been much investigation of fantasy as a literary genre, but little scrutiny of the subject as a visual art mode. The primary purpose of this thesis is to expose the significant and underreported effect of late Victorian visual art on the nascent mode of modern fantasy. This study begins by examining how the fantasy mode can be discerned through attention to configurations of space and time in artworks which attempt to create Secondary Worlds. It argues that the presence of the fantasy “chronotopes” of enclosure, density, distortion, and temporal dislocation in English art c. 1850-1920 constituted a novel art mode that developed in concurrence with fantasy literature. Thus, while past scholarship has located the genesis of fantasy in the novels of George MacDonald (1824-1905) and William Morris (1834-1896), an understanding of the prevalence of the fantasy mode in the Victorian visual arts helps to elevate the hitherto unrecognised significance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s (1828-1882) work within the history of modern fantasy. Analysis of the compositional aspects of Rossetti’s Secondary Worldbuilding reveals him as the progenitor of ideas that would significantly influence modern fantasy art and literature. The impact of this branch of Pre-Raphaelitism on fantasy art is then traced through the proliferation of the fantasy chronotopes in the work of Rossetti’s peers William Burges (1827-1881), George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898), and Morris, whose series works serve as early examples of Secondary World Building in cultural artefacts. The study concludes with an examination of fantasy art made by a forgotten generation of artists who emerged after Rossetti’s death in 1882. Case studies drawn from the work of Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931), Thomas Sturge Moore (1870-1944), Gerald Moira (1867-1959), and Bernard Sleigh (1872-1954) highlight the prevalence of this mode within turn of the century English art in a way that unequivocally recognises the significance of the mode and these artists to the production of subsequent art and literature. In this manner, fantasy is established as a pervasive art mode that permeated English culture in a profound and lasting way.