ART REVIEW : MINI-WORLD OF ‘FANTASY’ AT HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

Not everything’s coming up roses--or fairies and nymphs--in “Fantasy Art: British Drawings and Watercolors.” This sweet little show, in the changing exhibition gallery at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens (through June 28), has its share of the grotesque and the weird.

Among the 19th- and early 20th-Century works by about 30 artists are pastel watercolors of oversize flowers, undersize people and moony lovers done up in medieval garb, but there are also incisive ink drawings of shadowy characters with hook noses and claw-like hands. Thomas Rowlandson, for example, delights in drawing wonderfully wicked parallels between human forms and those of animals and beer mugs.

Some of the nastiness are comic, as when Isaac Cruikshank creates a randy fellow who scares the wits out of a couple taking an evening stroll. Other examples are wildly romantic, as when Richard Doyle invents a beautiful witch who offers a poisoned cup to a knight, hoping to spirit him off into the hills.

Richard Dadd, on the other hand, stops just short of drawing blood in the prettiest beheading you ever saw. This watercolor tells the tale of an Irish pagan king who cut off his daughter’s head when she refused to marry him. The grisly myth acquires the chill of realism when you learn that Dadd did this dainty piece of work while incarcerated in a mental asylum after he killed his own dad.

The dark undercurrent of the exhibition is not the main point, but it does provide a strange, scary foil to the sugary charm of the art. Unsettling aspects also emphasize the fact that the central figure of the show, Charles Doyle, was a deeply troubled man. Like Dadd, he did time in mental institutions, though not for crime. The emotional instability that plagued him as a civil servant in Edinburgh finally sent him over the edge and landed him in Irish asylums where it’s said he did his best work.

A fascinating and very gifted character, Doyle (1832-1893) was only known to scholars as the father of author Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) and the brother of popular illustrator Richard Doyle when a large body of his work was offered to the Huntington in 1969.

The art was attributed to Richard Doyle, but Huntington curator Robert Wark knew that was incorrect. Charmed and intrigued by the work, he finally tracked down a family member who revealed the story of a disturbed artist who had been kept under wraps in deference to his mental health.

The Huntington not only acquired the cache that had been offered but sought and found additional pieces. The San Marino museum now owns the principal collection of Charles Doyle’s work.

The portion of this holding ensconced in “Fantasy Art,” an exhibition selected by associate curator Shelley Bennett, represents Doyle as an artist of fertile imagination and admirable facility. Working with delicate ink line and soft washes, he draws his daughter as a white-draped figure floating in the sky beside a huge sunflower, a fear-gripped family at “The Witching Hour” and a smiling toad under a bush.

The strange naivete of his visions mingles with an intensity of purpose that makes his art quite compelling. If it’s difficult to ride the same wavelength as a man who imagined fairies dancing among haystacks, riding on the back of an ermine or having tete-a-tetes under the shade of enormous plants, it’s still marvelous to imagine a time when such innocent escapism served an authentic social need.

Fantasy art flourished in England from the late 18th through the early 20th centuries, reaching its apogee in the 1840s and providing thousands of illustrations for books. The usual--and quite sensible--explanation for the rampant popularity of the genre is that it provided a whimsical balance to the grim facts of evermore industrialized urban life.

Artists such as Charles Doyle poured all their energy into paintings and drawings that grew entirely from their minds, while figures such as Arthur Rackham enjoyed great success as fanciful illustrators of literature. As we see in some wonderfully grotesque faces penned by George Romney, the fashionable portraitist, the fantasy craze also permeated higher echelons of art.

If you want to visit the Huntington on a Sunday, it’s necessary to make a parking reservation. Call (818) 405-2141 for information.