‘Heatherley’s fairy paintings are distinctive, apparently showing knowledge of Hieronymus Bosch and Jan Bruegel the Elder. Whatever the intended implications of the mushrooms, they are an important feature in this composition. Apart from sexual innuendo, they may refer to hallucination and the the world of apparitions. The unusual back view of the nude figure must owe a debt to the seated figure in Ingres’s La Baigneuse de

Valpincon, repeated as the central figure in The Turkish Bath in 1863.’ (Christopher Wood, Victorian Fairy Painting, p 135)

Described by his students as resembling a ‘medieval necromancer’, Thomas Heatherley ran Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, the first art school to admit women on equal terms with men (from the start in 1845, when it was called Leigh’s).