Cottingley Fairies Interest
Wright (Elsie)
Two watercolours, one signed Elsie Wright 1918 and one Elsie Hill 1948 (Elsie's married name), both framed and glazed. The 1918 picture is Cottingley Beck, which ran at the bottom of Elsie's garden, and by which Elsie and Frances Griffiths took their famous fairy pictures.

These photographs were first taken in 1917. The story goes that Elsie's mother was frustrated with the girls coming back wet from playing in the Beck. They insisted they went to see the fairies and borrowed Elsie's father's camera to prove it. They returned with the first of the photographs. Whilst her father quickly rejected the pictures as fake, her mother was convinced and brought them to the attention of Edward Gardner of the Theosophical Society. From there the story, and the controversy, spread, most famously to Arthur Conan-Doyle.

Elsie was the artistic member of the duo. It was she who copied the illustrations from Princess Mary's Gift Book, and her father was the first doubter of the photographs because he knew of her talents. The second watercolour is of Kanchenjunga mountain, sketched whilst in Darjeeling in 1948. It shows a tree "overcome with plants attaching themselves on to them" which has twisted into a strange shape.

These two paintings show something of the artistic side of Wright which helped create an enduring hoax and are offered with a small photograph of Frances Griffiths taken by Fred Ash of Liverpool, Nottingham and Blackpool.

Provenance note: Elsie Wright/Hill at school with client's grandfather