Snowdrop and the seven little men

The story of Snowdrop (Snow White) is one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but Batten would have taken the story from Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book first published in 1890. Batten also worked as a book illustrator and provided images for several collections of fairy tales in the 1890s. He was a pioneer of the late-Victorian revival of tempera painting (i.e. painting with egg yolk rather than oil) and this work is said to be his first painting in that medium.