Lisa's World: The Other World’s darkest portrait-painter

The increasingly troubled world of Richard Dadd

Oct 15

Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke

Richard Dadd (1817–1886) is primarily remembered for two things: the odd mixture of whimsy and darkness in his fairy-themed paintings, and the mental illness that saw him committed to Broadmoor Hospital. He’s also forever associated with the rock band Queen, thanks to his painting The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which inspired Freddie Mercury’s song of that name on Queen II in 1974.

Dadd was born in Chatham, Kent, in August 1817 to chemist Robert Dadd and Mary Ann Martin. Aged 20, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Art Schools, soon establishing a reputation as one of the foremost artists of his day. Alongside colleagues including William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg, and Henry O’Neil, Dadd founded The Clique, a group of ambitious young painters who sought inspiration for their art in literature, particularly Shakespeare and Lord Byron, creating scenes reflecting the Victorian fascination with fantasy, mythology and theatrical staging. Dadd’s career within the traditional structures of the mainstream British art establishment seemed assured; but there were storm clouds gathering in his troubled head.

The cultural phenomenon of Victorian fairy painting

Fairy painting as a genre wasn’t new in the 19th century, but it became one of the many calling cards of Victorian England. Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Theodor von Holst were the most influential of the pre-Victorian fantasy-scene-painters, with Fuseli and von Holst, in particular, guiding the dramatic, sinister, gothic energy of Richard Dadd’s later paintings.

The Victorian interest in depicting fantasy realms, enshrined in the work of The Clique and the more celebrated Pre-Raphaelites, had several sources. First, the passion for fairy painting was linked to the 19th-century resurgence of enthusiasm for Shakespeare, particularly his “fairy plays”: The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Simultaneously, the phenomenon was a form of escapism in the face of the seismic social, industrial and environmental changes of the Victorian age. With rapidly increasing industrialisation and a life increasingly led in towns and suburbs, there was a yearning for scenes and subjects featuring the natural world.

Another, not insignificant reason for the surge in fantasy paintings was that mythological themes made it easier to bypass social censors. Many bucolic fairy scenes are less about a love of the little people and more about a love of naked flesh. Lots of the fairies, notably the female ones, are underdressed. A naked human cavorting in the woods was one thing; a naked fairy cavorting in those same woods was another, even when there was ostensibly no physical difference between the naked woman and the naked fairy.

And let’s not forget that most secret of sauces – zeitgeist. There was a brief craze for fairy paintings, and the temporary, mysterious madness of fads goes a long way to explaining many otherwise inscrutably odd trends and movements. Richard Dadd and his peers were happy to stoke the zeitgeist. Notable among these peers were John Anster Fitzgerald and Arthur Rackham, who shared Dadd’s edgier approach to the theme. Other fairy painters include Joseph Noel Paton, Richard Doyle, Charles Doyle, and later talents such as Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Cecily Mary Barker (of Flower Fairies fame), whose cute creations echo the more innocent, Regency-clothed fairies of Amelia Jane Murray rather than the quirkier Dadd, Fitzgerald and Rackham.

Richard Dadd, Titania Sleeping - overpainted and underdressed?

Dadd’s fairy paintings

Before mental health issues swept Dadd’s life off the rails, he had gained fame as a painter of fairy scenes, drawing largely on Shakespeare. It was everything the Victorian viewer wanted – pastoral idylls, theatrical staging, classical mythology, dancing fairies, skimpy clothing, and painstaking detail.

Notable examples from this early phase include his 1841 oil paintings Titania Sleeping and Puck. These early creations mirrored the mythological paintings that had been fashionable since the 15th century. His fairy figures look like classical sculptures, but, in the macabre arches of bats and ape-like goblins in Titania Sleeping, there are signs of the dark, worrying beings he was to depict later.

In July 1842, Sir Thomas Phillips, former mayor of Newport and travel addict, hired Dadd as his official artist and draughtsman on an expedition to the southern Mediterranean and Middle East, a journey that culminated in a voyage up the Nile to Egypt. Dadd was suitably excited by the commission, but it seems to have been the turning point in his mental journey. He is said to have worked in a kind of delirium throughout the trip, remaining outdoors, like a typical mad dog/Englishman, for hours in the blistering sun despite warnings to seek shade. The multitudes of people buzzing around the tourists, the unfamiliar customs and sounds, the grinning skull of poverty, the dazzling colours, and the generally overloaded senses of a middle-class Victorian gentleman on a pre-Club Med holiday beat their dangerous tattoo on the artist’s fevered brain. Whatever the causes – and genetics seems to have played a significant role – Dadd entered a psychological crisis. His delirium peaked when he declared himself an instrument of the Egyptian god Osiris, sent to do his bidding on Earth.

Richard Dadd’s dreams of Osiris were initially written off as the eccentric effects of sunstroke, but his condition worsened when he returned to England in May 1843. His family took him to recuperate in Cobham in Kent, hoping the rural quiet would work its magic on the man’s troubled mind. But Osiris and his other personal demons didn’t cease their chatter, and Dadd became convinced that his father Robert was the Devil in disguise. On 28 August 1843, he stabbed him while they were walking in the public park in Shorne.

The panicking Richard Dadd fled to France, but he was unable to outrun his illness. After attempting to kill a fellow passenger with a razor during the ferry crossing, he was apprehended, declared to be of unsound mind, and committed to the criminal department of Bethlem psychiatric hospital, commonly known as Bedlam. He spent twenty years there before being transferred in 1864 to the high-security Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, which had opened the previous year. He remained there until his death from lung disease in January 1886.

Dadd’s doctors – including Sir Alexander Morison, William Wood, William Orange, and Sir William Charles Hood – recognised his artistic brilliance and encouraged him to continue painting.

Richard Dadd, Bacchanalian Scene

Post-Bedlam fairy paintings

Isolated within the high-security Victorian asylum system, Dadd redirected his creative energies inwards, to the dark mental realm where Osiris brooded. The fantastical worlds he painted retain something of their mythological antecedents, but the scenes are a tangle of images rather than coherent rural vistas.

Fairies remained a central focus of Dadd’s art during these long hospital years, but the style had shifted. Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (c. 854–1858) has its sombre figures scowling at each other in a claustrophobic mess of leaf litter. It’s no longer rural idyll – it’s hallucination. Bacchanalian Scene (1862) shows a maenad and two satyrs drinking from a golden goblet, entangled in foliage and fruit that may be headpieces and may just be the aggressive undergrowth. These are not fairies, as such, and certainly not entirely human. Everything about the three giant heads in the picture is worrying.

Richard Dadd, Contradiction: Oberon and Titania

Dadd’s masterpiece is widely agreed to be The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, painted between 1855 and 1864 while he was still at Bethlem. The artist put a decade of on-and-off labour into this dense, claustrophobic assembly of figures gathered around the “fairy feller” (as in tree-feller, but also as in fellow). He holds an axe, raised to strike a hazelnut. The background is sombre, thick, layered, crowded,¹ and, as ever, quietly menacing, and nothing about the painting hangs together. It is unfinished, hence the odd gaps in the dense, tortoiseshell-like background.

The Fairy Feller was commissioned by Bethlem hospital steward George Henry Haydon, who had seen Dadd’s earlier fairy paintings and wanted one for himself. There are apparently allusions to Dadd’s father’s murder in the scene. After his 1864 transfer to Broadmoor, Dadd stopped working on the painting, and it eventually came into the possession of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, who presented it to the Tate Gallery in 1963.

Dadd accompanied the painting with an explanatory poem detailing its folkloric and Shakespearean characters. It was this writing, as much as the painting itself, that informed Freddie Mercury’s 1974 song, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke – the various names in the song are taken from Dadd’s description.

Songe de la Fantasie (1864) is a pencil, pen, ink and watercolour rerun of The Fairy Feller, with the characters faded to ghosts behind grass blades and inked, shell-like spirals. It’s as if Dadd’s Osiris-fed visions are fading, leaving inscrutable patterns in their place.

Dadd extended the disturbed, hallucinatory palette through his other work, including Sketches to Illustrate the Passions, consisting of 32 sketches showing extreme emotional states such as “raving madness” and “murder”; imaginary coastal landscapes; and formal portraits of individuals notable for their rigid staging, obsessively meticulous detail, and unnerving, unblinking stares.

Richard Dadd, Songe de la Fantasie

The troubled Muse

Dadd’s pre-Bedlam and post-Bedlam fairy paintings come from separate but colliding worlds. The earlier works fit comfortably within the Victorian mainstream. The intense claustrophobia and psychological alienation of his later art is like a statement of what happens when you let the fairies take control. The figures in these later paintings are unfriendly, unsmiling, hostile, absorbed in their own inner worlds.

Modern psychiatrists and neuroscientists who have revisited Dadd’s medical record and paintings have concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, a genetic windfall that also affected other members of his family. Encounters with the Other World require altered states of mind. Osiris took Dadd to strange places, and his later art is a dark tunnel from which there is no way back. It doesn’t let you go.

I thought of opening with this final paragraph, but decided it would sit better here: As with so many things concerning faeries and their kin, I first met Richard Dadd’s work – and Henry Fuseli’s – in the pages of Katherine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies (1973). They seemed out of place there, and they seem to me perpetually out of place now. But Dadd got his claws into me in my teens, and he has lived with me ever since. I can’t say I actually like his work, but I find it endlessly fascinating and troubling.