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“The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke,” by Richard DaddI’ve posted a detail of this painting before without any comment, but this past week I’ve been working with it in for a project, so I did some research. (You can zoom in on it in detail at the Google Arts & Culture page, which I recommend while reading below.) The painter Richard Dadd (1817 to 1886) has a gruesome bio. After a trip to the Middle East as a young artist, he returned to London having begun showing signs of mental “distress.” Convinced he was a descendant of the Egyptian god Osiris, he planned to kill people possessed by demons. His father was on the top of the list. At a chalk pit in Kent, Richard murdered and dismembered him with a knife and razor. Richard then fled to France, still wearing the bloody clothes. In Calais, he attempted to kill a tourist with the razor and was finally arrested. Dadd confessed freely. He was carrying a list of targets in his pocket when captured; later, pictures he had drawn of acquaintances with their throats cut were found in his rooms. Dadd was one of the first committed as criminally insane to Bethlehem Hospital, also known as Bedlam, in 1844. In 1864, he was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, where he died 21 years later. The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a work of intricate detail, was painted under the encouragement or active patronage of the doctors in Bedlam, over a nine year period (1855-1864). Others of his works were also done in these hospitals. The styles across them differ a lot (check here), but this extract from Contradiction: Oberon & Titania shows similarities to the nature detail seen in Fairy Feller.
Fairy Feller remains unfinished—the yellowish parts are sketched; we’re usually asked to believe the woodsman with the sketched yellow axe in the middle, his back to us, is striking a nut in order to create a magical chariot for Queen Mab. Dadd suggests this himself (sort of?) in the long poem he wrote about the painting, “Elimination of a Picture & its Subject—called The Fellers' Master Stroke.” But he suggests a lot of other grim things, including that the woodsman fairy-feller is clothed in fairy skin:
And, frankly, he is a “feller” striking fairies down, yes?
On the other had, it’s incredibly hard to parse what he meant. Some others theorize that Dadd’s father is in the upper right, a pharmacist, as is Dadd as a young man; and that the Pope also appears, whom Dadd had on his hate list. I think there’s been a lot of twee-washing of this painting; it feels ominous to me, knowing the history with the razors and suspected demons. Some references: This is a nice YouTube video about it and the artistic context, including the Victorian interest in fairy paintings. The Tate has some podcast content (scroll down). Here’s a pictorial article on The Collector, with his other paintings, and a nice dive in Culture Trip. On to the news, and the links to the weird & esoteric! ... Subscribe to Things I Think Are Awesome to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Things I Think Are Awesome to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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