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  • Where Do Fairies Hide Their Heads?

  • Mid-late 19th century
  • Artist unknown, American folk artist
  • Oil on canvas
  • 68.8 x 55.9 cm., 27-1/8 x 22"
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2002.7

Essay by Nancy L. Huse, Professor Emerita of English and Anne Motto, Class of 2008

The tradition of American portraiture had been affected by the Enlightenment thinkers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their ideas about childhood emphasized children's natural gifts — the capacity to learn and the innocence that precedes experience of social relations outside the family (Brant and Cunningham 4). This departure from a Puritan ideology that viewed children as flawed by original sin led to changes in the portraiture tradition of stiffly positioned, properly dressed figures featured early in the 1800s. The girl in this portrait, apparently starting adolescence, seems to exhibit a more innocent and free nature than children from earlier eras in American painting.

The paper or magazine in the girl's hands is quite possibly the most interesting part of the portrait. Children in earlier portraits usually held a toy, a flower or an unidentifiable book. These objects signaled family status and values. The papers in this portrait bear the heading "Oh where do fairies hide their heads?" The girl is thus linked to a world beyond the United States; she is a reader-or perhaps a musician-who participates, like many other anglo-Americans, in the popular culture of England and Ireland. Although no author and date is given in the portrait, a poem with this very title was written by Thomas Haynes Bayly in 1797. Bayly was a British songwriter and dramatist who, inspired by a visit to Dublin, wrote many ballads still sung today. The ballad about the fairies hiding their heads was circulated as both a song and a poem; one printing of the poem appeared in 1895 in A Victorian Anthology (Stedman) and it also appeared in earlier collections designed for girls (www.english).

Bayly's poem suggests that the "little spirits" of the fairies appear in our world only when "green leaves come again." In times of frost and snow, the fairies may hide in coral caves of the sea, or even set up winter parties in "red Vesuvius." Once they return in the spring, nothing can stop their music and mischief, and "The maids, to keep the elves aloof/ Will bar the doors in vain; /No key hole will be fairy-proof/ When green leaves come again." This assertion that fairies can't be kept away in spring is a hint that girls will share their mischief and freedom. While the question of where fairies hide their heads in winter is an early version of Holden Caulfield's preoccupation with how fish survive New York cold as well as how children can be saved from adulthood, the poem and portrait do not share this later American literary lament about inevitable loss of innocence. The young girl we see in the painting seems steadfastly and cheerfully situated in her late childhood.