The Gift of Red Shoes

In the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, there’s a story called The Juniper Tree.

A small boy whose mother died gets a new step mother who (surprise) favors her own daughter. Eventually, the step mother kills the little boy (she chops his head off with the lid of a achest. Yikes!) and covers it up by tying a ribbon around his neck to hold his head on (who remembers the story of the girl with the green ribbon?!) until she can trick her daughter into believing SHE killed her brother (by getting the girl to shake him to get his attention at which point his head rolls away and she is [understandably] traumatized).

THEN the stepmother cooks the little boy and feeds it to the father who greedily eats it all up, having no idea it is his son. Of course, the little girl has been sworn to secrecy, but she is devastated, so she takes her brother’s bones and carefully wraps them and buries them under the juniper tree in their yard. Even though she is still desperately sad, she feels some peace from this.

The little boy’s soul becomes a bird who flies around singing a beautiful song (that tells of his murder, but no one understands). As payment for singing his song, the bird receives a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a mill stone.

Eventually, the bird makes it back home. The father hears the song and goes out to see. The bird drops the gold chain around his neck and it fits perfectly. Then the bird sings again and the little girl goes outside. The bird drops the red shoes and the little girl puts them on.

Finally (and I think you can guess where this is going) the stepmother goes outside to hear the birdsong and the mill stone is dropped on her head and kills her.

The juniper tree then lights on fire and transforms back into the little boy and…

You guessed it…

They live happily ever after.

I wanted to paint these little shoes as part of my fairytale shoes series because they are a gift. There are actually a few stories of red shoes, but the shoes end up being a curse. I chose to focus on shoes that brought joy or benefit to their wearers.

Like the glass slippers, these are painted and cut out and installed on vellum-finish paper. What’s unique about these shoes is, each part of the shoe is separately created and then the shoe is built. From the inner shoe to the button, heel, and strap, these shoes are a work of love. This added further depth and dimension and detail.

The photo was professionally captured by David Hawkinson. He gets those shadows so well!