Richard Dadd
Richard Dadd was a famous English painter who lived through the Victorian era, when industrialism and poverty blossomed in England. Dadd was born in 1817 and was a very talented painter already in his early years. He was young and very promising and already at the age of 20, he got into the Royal Academy of Arts. He was especially known for his very detailed paintings of elves, fairies and other supernatural creatures. In connection with the academy, Dadd went on a tour with a former mayor, Sir Thomas Phillips, to the Middle East. As they were cruising on the Nile, something strange happened with Dadd, his personality began to change, he started to hallucinate and he became violent. He wanted to kill the pope, but failed as he was too well protected by guards. When Dadd returned to England in 1843 his father tried to explain the strange happenings by claiming that his son had got a sunstroke, which had coursed his weird behavior. It turned out that that was not the case.
One sunny day in august the father and son went out for a walk, when suddenly Dadd did something horrible which would induce great consequences to himself. As the two were walking, Dadd became very aggressive and cut his father’s throat. The father died immediately. Dadd’s explanation of the killing would be that the devil appeared to him and told him that he had to kill his father. After the tragic event, Dadd tried to escape to France, but after trying to kill a fellow tourist on his way to Paris, he eventually got overpowered, arrested and put in the mental-institution, Bethlem Royal Hospital, where he got diagnosed with schizophrenia. Dadd thought he was possessed by the spirit of the Egyptian deity, Osiris, who made him do these bizarre things.
The mental-institution was a bit different from other because the inmates were allowed to exercise their hobbies as a sort of cure to their illness. Although Dadd was placed in a prison, he continued painting pictures and it was in Bethlem Royal, he made his most famous work of art, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Even though it took him nine years to finish the extremely detailed picture with microscopic specifications, he did not consider it complete in the end. It’s even shown in the left corner that it’s only a sketch, a strange choice considering the time and work Dadd put into it, as he almost produced a 3D-like effect with a unique technique. He added the word Quasi to the title, which means “almost”, to tell the recipient that he was aware about the flaws in his painting. In correlation to the picture, Dadd wrote a long poem called Elimination of a Picture and its subject – called - The Fellers’ Master Stroke in which he name and give every character in the painting a purpose. He includes old English legends and Shakespeare in an attempt to show that he didn’t paint in randomness, but was affected by certain inspirations.
The odd thing about Dadd’s paintings were that they did not reflect any matter of insanity or the environmental limitation of his surroundings, this was probably because he didn’t consider himself as a ill person. Dadd painted supernatural creatures, which showed his belief in the spiritual world, which was very normal in the Victorian period and it was not an uncommon belief that the dead could communicate with the living, it was actually a rather popular thought and maybe that’s the reason why his paintings became as famous as they did.
In the year of 1864 he was transferred to Broadmoor asylum where he spoke to his psychologist about the murder of his father, to whom he seemed unregretful as he described the crime scene as perfect in a theatrically way.
In 1963, The Fairy Feller entered the Tate collection where it was presented on a gallery. It soon became the favorite and it was the first time his pictures were shown to a wider audience since the 1840’s. He was now considered a hero among the Victorians coursed a new consensus concerning the inherited system of the asylums. He was a symbol of a survivor from the mainstream Victorian ways of art from which he was locked away.
Dadd died in 1886 in Broadmoor, but has not been forgotten in the artistic world, as the famous magazine, Oz, in the 1971’s rereleased the story of the artist, which made the lead singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury, use phrases from Dadd’s poem as lyrics to the song Fairy Feller Master.