Fairy scene at the Landslip, Blacks' Spur

Nicholas Caire specialised in photographing picturesque aspects of the landscape of southern Australia. This, his most celebrated photograph, shows a man on the right dwarfed by the giant tree ferns that surround him. Tree ferns exerted a powerful fascination for the nineteenth-century viewer and the word pteridomania was specially coined to describe the passion for these plants. Ferns were of interest as exotic reminders of the prehistory of the planet and for the decorative appeal of their graceful, flowing shapes. Commentators at the time were given to flights of poetic fancy when describing their unique qualities. Caire, for instance, noted that fern gullies ‘suggested the homes of fairies [and] are calculated to give the visitor, on his first impression, a feeling of ecstatic bewilderment.’ (Nicholas Caire in Nicholas Caire and J.W. Lindt, Companion Guide to Healsville, Black’s Spur, Narbethong and Marysville, Atlas Press, Melbourne, 1904, p.34-5). His beautiful image of a ‘fairy scene’ was immensely popular in the nineteenth century and, in line with the commercialisation of photography in this period, was available in a number of formats from albumen silver prints to enlarged, coloured photolithographs and wood engravings. The most lavish, and certainly the rarest, version of Fairy scene is this crystoleum—a handcoloured image on glass encased in a luxurious red velvet frame.

Text © National Gallery of Victoria, Australia