Original pencil artwork of four fairies, depicted as children, serenading two wasps and a grasshopper. Signed E G Thomson and dated 1878. Emily Gertrude Thomson, 1850 -1929, was born in Glasgow and studied at the Manchester School of Art. This is a beautifully assured drawing, the lines delineating the fairy-children’s limbs are exquisite and their facial expressions can all be read as they serenade the insects dancing in the air. Depicting fairies as children was a standard convention in the late Victorian era and Thomson soon found a commercial outlet for her talents. In 1883 she illustrated William Allingham’s The Fairies – A Child’s Song. The work was well received and was seen by Lewis Carroll who contacted Thomson. They became lifelong friends and often visited art galleries and sketched together. Carroll was generally reticent, and their genuine and long-lasting friendship was apparently an unusual one for him. Thomson produced a miniature portrait of Carroll and when he died wrote a short biographical memoir of him. They collaborated twice, firstly in 1890 when she drew new covers for Carroll’s The Nursery Alice. She also drew the ‘fairy-fancies’ for Carroll’s Three Sunsets in 1898, the last work published in his lifetime. There is a clear similarity between this drawing and the ones in Three Sunsets.