The foam sprite

The Foam Sprite, painted by Herbert James Draper in 1897 and held at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, depicts a supernatural female figure associated with the sea's foam — a subject that participates in the Victorian and Edwardian tradition of the nature spirit, the embodiment of a natural element in female form. The foam sprite or sea-sprite was related in popular imagination to the nereids and sea-nymphs of classical mythology, to the German undine tradition of water spirits, and to the British fairy painting tradition that had flourished in the mid-Victorian period in the work of Richard Doyle and John Anster Fitzgerald. By 1897 Draper was producing his most celebrated mythological marine works — Ulysses and the Sirens dates to 1894, The Lament for Icarus to 1898 — and The Foam Sprite belongs to this intense period of mythological production. The Art Gallery of South Australia, one of Australia's oldest and most significant collecting institutions, acquired the work as part of its commitment to holding significant examples of British academic painting.

The foam sprite figure requires Draper to suggest an airy, non-material quality for a supernatural being born from sea-foam. His handling of light — luminous, diffused, and silver-white in the foam itself — creates the visual equivalent of the sprite's elemental nature.