How do fairy tales, with roots reaching deep into the past, continue to cast their spell on us? This question animates The Art of Fairy Tales by Joanna Ebenstein. The book is a visual exploration of the ever-changing lives that fairy tales take on through the imagination of artists.
In the preface to her essay collection Forms of Enchantment (2018), historian, mythographer and writer Marina Warner invokes the classical idea of enargeia, or “shining vitality”, to describe the vividness through which an artwork seems almost alive. The collection of artworks that Ebenstein presents in The Art of Fairy Tales captures this shining vitality across centuries of fairy tale art.
Each thematic chapter opens with a short introduction before presenting a selection of artworks accompanied by concise but detailed accounts of their artists and historical contexts. Ebenstein avoids a chronological approach, allowing representations of the same otherworldly figures from distant periods to meet on the page.
As a result, William Nicholson’s luminous 1922 illustration of a fairy stemming from a flower faces contemporary artist Mat Collishaw’s 1997 photographs of fairies amid technological debris on the opposite page. This act of unexpected juxtaposition sharpens the reader’s eye to the changing visions of the marvellous, showing how each artist has imagined anew what magic and otherworldly beings might look like.
The heart of Ebenstein’s collection lies in the Golden Age of Illustration (circa 1880 to 1930), when richly illustrated children’s books flourished. Her research brings lesser-known visual treasures into conversation with more familiar artworks.
François-Louis Schmied’s illustrations for the 1926 story Histoire de la Princesse Boudour (The Story of Princess Boudour), the French translation of one of the tales from The Arabian Nights, for instance, appeared in an art deco edition of only 20 copies. The book also features Austrian artists Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban’s sumptuous illustrations for a 1905 Viennese deluxe edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
As they pass from one artistic form to another, fairy tales undergo continual visual metamorphoses. Ebenstein’s collection makes visible how fluidly these narratives travel between media. For instance, Russian painter Léon Bakst’s exuberant 1915 poster design for Stravinsky’s The Firebird transmutes the Russian folktale, adapted for the ballet, into a compelling visual form.
German animator Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), inspired by the fairy tale One Thousand and One Nights, meanwhile, transforms storytelling through silhouette animation, using hand-cut figures animated frame by frame.
Witches and dangerous women
Some of the most provocative illustrations appear in the chapter Witches and Dangerous Women. Ebenstein asks what happens when women cross culturally prescribed boundaries and reclaim power for themselves. It’s a question with a long history in fairy tale scholarship.
WikiArt
In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (2006), literary scholar Jack Zipes examined how fairy tales teach societal rules while also offering a clever way to challenge them. In Ebenstein’s collection, this tension unfolds into sequences of images that expose shifting ideas about power and gender. This includes Théophile Alexandre Steinlen’s Metamorphosis – Black Cats Transforming Themselves into Witches (c. 1890), a colour lithograph which depicts exultant broomstick-riding witches sweeping across the Parisian sky.
More than a century later, fairy tale imagery continues to offer artists a language through which women’s agency can be explored.
Spanish illustrator Ana Juan’s illustrations for Caperucita Roja (2022), her visual retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, are startling. They depict an eerie red-capped girl lifting her skirts to reveal a black wolf made of shadow beneath them, its white teeth stark against the darkness. The image captures the darker meanings associated with the tale which, as Ebenstein notes, became less explicit as versions of the story were adapted for children.
Israeli photographer Dina Goldstein’s series Fallen Princesses (2007–2009), meanwhile, subverts the dominant iconography of Disney princesses to question ideals of femininity and happiness. These forms of artistic engagement resonate with what I termed “fairy-tale artivism” in The Routledge Companion to Fairy Tales (2026): creative reworkings of fairy tales that draw attention to social inequities and open imaginative possibilities for change.
As folklorist Cristina Bacchilega has observed, fairy tales can “activate transformations in their characters and in us as creators–audiences–adapters”. Ebenstein skilfully makes this transformative movement visible, as stories change through the artists who encounter them anew.
Her book ultimately answers the question with which it begins through the artworks themselves, showing why these centuries-old stories retain such a powerful hold on our imagination. Fairy tales continue to nourish artistic invention because their characters embrace continual metamorphosis, discovering yet another possibility within an old story.
The artists brought together in The Art of Fairy Tales have revelled in these possibilities; page after page, their delight passes to the reader, as long-told wonders come alive before the eye.
The realm of the marvellous has always hovered between what we imagine and what we actually see. The word “marvel” comes from the Latin mirari – to wonder at or to regard with astonishment. The marvellous, then, begins with an encounter that catches the eye and awakens a sense of wonder. Fairy tale art makes that encounter feel real: wolves creep out from beneath skirts, cats transform into witches over Parisian rooftops and paper cutouts breathe life into enchanted worlds. Wonder resides in that instant of recognition and estrangement, when a tale we think we know by heart appears before us with a face and form we have never seen before.
The Art of Fairy Tales encourages readers to enter the long history of fairy tale illustration with eyes wide open, discovering how old tales can become wondrous once more with every new act of seeing.
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Elena Sottilotta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.