Come and Meet the Flower Fairies at Watts Gallery

Published on: 21 Oct, 2024
Updated on: 24 Oct, 2024

The Elm Fairy © The Estate of Cicely Mary Barker, 1940

By Alice Fowler

Generations of little girls – myself included – grew up with the Flower Fairies: an enchanting series of illustrated books that featured whimsical, delicate-featured fairies alongside botanically accurate drawings of trees and plants.

The creator of those books is featured in a new exhibition, “Flower Fairies: the Magical World of Cicely Mary Barker”, on show at Watts Gallery from October 22nd to April 27th next year.

The exhibition is the gallery’s first to be aimed full-square at children, with many opportunities to play and create, explore nearby woodlands on a new Tree Fairy Trail, and step inside recreated scenes from Barker’s books.

The Lavender Fairy © The Estate of Cicely Mary Barker, 1944

Presented in association with Penguin Random House Children’s UK, the exhibition takes visitors on a journey from the artist’s childhood to the creation of her fairy characters.

While children play, adults – mothers and grandmothers especially – will surely enjoy a nostalgic chance to revisit their own childhood favourites, including original illustrations of the White Bindweed Fairy, the Lavender Fairy and the Elm Fairy, among others.

The original Flower Fairies books I read as a child, published by Blackie and Son, had been well read by my mother and her sisters: so much so that the spines were worn to threads and the pages somewhat sticky, from small fingers.

First published a hundred years ago, the Flower Fairies seem born of a more innocent age, when children were more closely connected to nature, and – without modern distractions – books such as Barker’s could be read and reread for hours. Their effect was profound: inspiring in many young readers – alongside Beatrix Potter’s books, which they resembled in format – a lifelong reverence for nature.

Looking at Barker’s illustrations now, what shines through is their authenticity. Barker lived in Croydon (then part of Surrey), and modelled her fairy characters on neighbours’ children or those attending her elder sister Dorothy’s nursery school.

She took botanical accuracy seriously too, sending paintings to Kew Gardens to check she had identified species correctly. While her subject matter was whimsical, her attention to detail was rooted firmly in the real world.

Photograph of Cicely Mary Barker © Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd., 2024

Born in 1895, Cicely was a delicate child who spent most of her time at home, often confined to bed. To pass the time, she read books and started to draw.

One of her earliest pictures, on display at Watts, shows a fairy chasing butterflies (c. 1905): showing that, from an early age, fairies occupied her imagination. She also enjoyed dressing up the family’s pet dogs and drawing self-portraits.

Cicely’s father, Walter Barker, was a grain merchant, and an accomplished artist himself. Recognising his daughter’s talent, he enrolled her at the Croydon School of Art when she was 13, and also paid for a correspondence course in art.

When Cicely was just 17, her family’s comfortable, middle-class existence was rocked when her father died suddenly from a bacterial infection.

Determined to help with the family finances, and with help from her correspondence tutor, Cicely created several sets of postcards, published during and after World War One.

After the war, as interest in spiritualism and fairies grew, Cicely embarked on the Flower Fairies books that would make her name. First published in 1923, with accompanying poems, they became an international publishing sensation.

Queen Mary was a fan, and the Watts exhibition includes a message from the late Queen Mother, thanking Barker for a book sent to the young Princess Elizabeth. More books followed, including The Lord of the Rushie River (1938), about a swan Barker had dreamt of as a child.

It is interesting to note that for all the apparent innocence of her works – in the tradition of other female artists such as Kate Greenaway and Mabel Lucie Attwell – Barker was driven by commercial forces: the need to support her family. Like Mary Watts, co-founder of Watts Gallery, she was an entrepreneur. Generations of her readers can be thankful for that.

Flower Fairies: the Magical World of Cicely Mary Barker runs at Watts Gallery from October 22nd 2024 to April 27th 2025. Click here for more information.