First published in 1888 as part of his renowned anthology The Happy Prince and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ is a tale of unrequited love, radical transformation and extraordinary sacrifice.

Written in Wilde’s florid literary style, ‘The Nightingale’ presents an elaborate world that delicately blurs the real and the imagined. With its cast of enchanting characters, including animals, trees and flowers that come to life in full speech, Wilde’s setting is by turns whimsical, eccentric and fragile.

For artist Del Kathryn Barton, ‘The Nightingale’ presented a rich archetypal touchstone. In her inimitable aesthetic style, remarkably like Wilde’s with its graceful melding of realism and fantasy, Barton breathed new life into the story. Abundant, bold, brilliant and vivid, her interpretation was at the same time captivatingly delicate, detailed and entrancing.

It would take an exceptional team led by Barton and Brendan Fletcher as directors, and Method Studios as creative collaborators, to eventually realise this 21st-century Nightingale world. Through an astounding combination of digital and hand-crafted stop-motion animation, Wilde’s timeless fairytale is stunningly reawakened on screen.

Pensive and forlorn, Wilde’s male protagonist is passionately consumed by the Professor’s Daughter and is desperate to capture her lasting affections. With ‘hair as dark as the hyacinth-blossom’, lips as ‘red as the rose of his desire’, a face ‘like pale ivory’ and ‘sorrow set upon his brow’, the Student sits caught between the 19th-century preoccupation with Philosophy and Metaphysics, and the ardent pursuit of true Love.

Barton dedicated two of her Nightingale works to the Student’s character. Combining her distinctive black line work with softly-coloured confetti dots and bleeding painted edges, she magically brings dualism to his resolve – confident and uncompromising on the one hand; brooding and lovesick on the other.

A key challenge for the entire creative group was how to digitally embody this duality. The task of combining different faces from Barton’s two canvasses, bringing gradation to the Student’s expression while maintaining the raw brushstrokes and hand-crafted feel, was enormously complex.

Over several months, Barton, Fletcher and the Method Studios’ team workshopped the original components: they layered painted imagery with digital recalibrations, built and shot the Student’s handmade hair and red sash, painstakingly sketched and mapped out his every characteristic, and integrated Benedict Samuel’s voice-over. Only then, when all the elements were properly aligned, did their Student truly come to life.

The fragile and rare Red Rose is the object of the Student’s material desire; his ultimate offering to the Professor’s Daughter as he courts her unwavering affections.

Sensitive to the Student’s anguish, Wilde’s Nightingale selflessly undertakes to find the impossible rose. Courageous and gracious, she soars through the night sky from White Rose to Yellow Rose, searching for Red. Declaring the Student as her own ‘true lover’, the Nightingale devotedly dedicates her journey to him.

Just as her quest grows ever more futile, the Rose-Tree fortuitously reveals his true colour to be as ‘red as the feet of the dove’. Though Winter has chilled his veins and ‘frost has nipped his buds’, the Tree offers up his petals but only if the Nightingale sings with her breast against his thorn, piercing her heart, giving her life-blood to him.

As if by the Nightingale’s own brushstrokes, Barton spectacularly paints the Red Rose into full bloom. Delicate, detailed and veined, and with its own beautiful eye, the Rose is personified magnificently in pinks and reds.

Embodying Barton’s Rose in its most fulsome state would take an extraordinary combination of digital manipulation and practical animation, alongside the creation of an actual rose in seven different prop forms. Using stop-motion techniques, the Nightingale’s bloodlines are transformed with paint and the White Rose’s petals are gradually stained crimson.

The Professor’s Daughter brusquely rejects the Student’s gift of the impossible Red Rose, in favour of jewels from the Chamberlain’s Nephew. Scornfully demeaning the Student’s status and cruelly reflecting the social milieu of the time, she prompts him to relinquish Love completely and abandon its promise and value.

Opulently costumed in black and pearl with lavish adornments, Barton’s Daughter has a dramatic but timeless feel. Synonymous with so many of her painted feminine subjects who combine innocent youthfulness with a mature intensity, the Daughter majestically sits against an intricate backdrop of rich patterning and texture. With blushed pink cheeks, deep red lips and wondrously tussled tresses, she is both striking and stubborn.

To bring the Daughter to screen, the filmmakers digitally rebuilt her every feature, including creating a life-size rendering of her dress and a full head of paper hair, as well as integrating Sophie Lowe’s perfectly poised voice-over. Barton’s background dot-work was expertly coded as an algorithm to appear as if free-falling, and frame-by-frame the Daughter’s movements were shot and remastered. The resulting portrait is a stunning amalgam of Barton’s renowned aesthetic and Wilde’s original character, realised in a rich animated realm.

Image: The daughter
Del Kathryn Barton, 2011-12
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
Courtesy of ARTAND Foundation

From book to canvas to screen, Oscar Wilde’s titular bird, the Nightingale, soars evocatively as the archetypal, timeless heroine—at once naïve and wise, young and old, bold and sentimental.

With grace and courage, Wilde’s Nightingale selflessly undertakes to find the Student a rare red rose; his prized gift her ultimate offering. In the greatest gesture of sacrificial love, she gives herself wholly to its creation. Passionately reciting her sweet song in the moonlight, her breast is pierced against the thorn, and her life-blood is dramatically surrendered as the White Rose’s petals are stained red. And yet, despite the trauma and drama of the Nightingale’s surrender, a captivating beauty and transformative energy underscores the story.

With creative compassion and a self-described ‘physiological and emotional connection’, Barton paints Wilde’s Nightingale into a resplendent form. With an indelible injection of colour, contour and texture, the Nightingale is breathtakingly energised on canvas. Wilde’s ‘true lover’ is, for Barton, a ‘true artist who gives completely of her deepest essence’.

Transported to screen, Barton and Fletcher knew that it would take a unique talent to truly capture the Nightingale’s voice, and work in unison with the stunning animation. Actress Mia Wasikowska and singer-songwriter Sarah Blasko combined forces to vocalise Wilde’s central character. Innocent and pure, intense and raw, the Nightingale was brought to life—from pressed ink, to brilliant watercolour, to incredible digital form.

Image: wilder grew her song
Del Kathryn Barton, 2011-12
acrylic, gouache, watercolour and ink on polyester canvas
Collection of Del Kathryn Barton