Richard Dadd
(1817-1886)
by Joey Ancaster
"Outlier" is a term in statistics referring to an event, an item, a
person that doesn't fit the pattern, that falls far beyond defined boundaries. Richard
Dadd, a minor Victorian painter, is one of the more fascinating outliers in art history.
After a promising youth (trained at the Royal Academy in London, then a two-year tour
of Europe and the Middle East) during which he painted and exhibited with moderate
success, in 1843 he murdered his father and spent the next 43 years in various mental
institutions in England.
While institutionalized, he continued to paint. Unlike career artists in the outside
world, he painted only for himself. The resulting small body of work is unique and
includes one masterpiece, The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (ca.
1860).
Only 15 inches by 25 inches, the picture, done in an obsessively detailed
representational mode, could be called, in present terminology, photorealist. There's only
one problem: the content, which is a fantastic, wholly realized scene from the life of
fairies.
Filled with tiny, meticulously painted figures going about all sorts of little fairy
tasks, the work defies reproduction. Dadd this once pulled off that rare trick in art of
creating a window into an entirely imagined world. Standing in front of the picture in the
Tate Gallery, one is drawn in. So convincing is the fantasy that Dadd conjured up, the
museum, London, this world--everything vanishes, and paradoxically the fairy microcosmos
is for a time the only reality.*
As for the specific details in the picture, the Tate's own guide (Looking at
Pictures in the Tate Gallery) has this to say:
In a long poem, written
about the time he finished it, the painter tells us that the fairies have gathered at the
command of the white bearded man in the middle with a gold hat and club. They are watching
the Fairy Feller in brown who is about to split open a nut with his axe to make a new
carriage for the Fairy Queen, Mab. Her tiny figure can be seen riding in the old one
across the brim of the bearded man's hat.
The idea comes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. "Queen Mab comes drawn
with a team of little atomies, her wagoner a small grey coated gnat. Her chariot is an
empty hazel shell."
Apparently, the painting began with a canvas on which Dadd spread some paint roughly. He
looked at this in the way that you look at clouds and painted what the marks seemed to
suggest. This allowed his fantasy to grow far beyond the original idea. Perhaps it is also
why the whole picture seems full from bottom to top.
The long thin grasses are a beautiful invention. They partly hide the fairies and make you
believe you might have missed them even though they were always there. They also show you
the size of the figures -- it would be difficult to tell otherwise. |
Go to The Fairy
Feller's Master Stroke (190k)
*Pop culture note: Queen, on their second album, has a song based on the painting.
Send this page to a friend.
Back to Magellan's
Log 17
Magellan's
Log front page
|