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Friday 19 November 2010

Bendigo Art Gallery, white rabbits and A Midsummer Night's Dream

Did the 4 hour journey up to Bendigo recently to catch up with friends and, while there, spent some time at the art gallery.  Bendigo has a wonderful gallery and we always try and spin round it if we can.  Apart from some of the old favourites, it had put together an exhibition called Looking For Faeries - The Victorian Tradition, featuring a wide range of work from Arthur Rackham to Frederick McCubbin and Artur Loreirou, and part of its focus was the darker side of that tradition, which I particularly enjoyed.


I never realised that the white rabbits in Edwin Landseer's Scene from a Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania and Bottom (1848-51) is said to have inspired Lewis Carroll's white rabbit in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


One I particularly enjoyed, for returning a darker note to the over-Disneyised story of Snow White, was John Dickson Batten's Snowdrop and the Seven Little Men (1897).  They look a tad more sinister in Batten's world.

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