Painting: Method onto Madness

Insanity today is considered primarily a medical problem. But over the centuries the notion persisted that the mad were afflicted by God—and that along with this affliction went preternatural vision. The 19th century painter Richard Dadd had the fortune—as well as the misfortune—to embody the two definitions. His talent blossomed in an insane asylum. Yet his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, combines Boschian mystery with Alice-in-Wonderland fantasy in a way that makes it clear Dadd was a prophet of Surrealism. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, Critic Edward Lucie-Smith declares: "No 20th century British artist has succeeded in producing a picture as powerful yet as inexplicable."

The son of a London chemist, Dadd was born in 1817 and studied at the schools of the Royal Academy of Arts, where teachers cited him for his attention, good temper and diligence rather than for his talent. By the time he was 25, he had begun to paint canvases illustrating old English legends of the "little people"; these early canvases could have been produced by any competent illustrator. But during a trip to the Near East in 1842, Dadd began to have strange visions. After scaling the pyramids and strolling through bazaars, he wrote a friend, "I have lain down at night with my imagination so full of wild vagaries that I have doubted my own sanity." In Rome, he watched the Pope passing in a street procession and was seized by a wild urge to assault him on the spot. After returning to England, he confided to friends that he felt "the Great Fiend" was pursuing him. His worried father took him to the country for a rest. While the pair was strolling after supper, Richard Dadd turned on his father and stabbed him through the heart.

Dadd fled to France, but was arrested when he stabbed a fellow passenger in a diligence going to Fontainebleau. He was committed to London's historic Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, which has given its name to the language as "bedlam" (a Middle English variant of "Bethlehem").

Starved for Sport. In 1844, Bethlehem was bedlam indeed. Gentlefolk considered it a sport to come out to watch the inmates. Obstreperous patients were judiciously starved or given violent purgatives to keep them submissive. Deaths from overdoses of opiates were common. Dadd survived this hell for six years. In 1852, Dr. William Hood, a pioneer in England of modern mental therapy, was assigned to Bethlehem. Hood encouraged Dadd to take up brush and pencil once again. Hood's hospital steward, George Henry Haydon, was an amateur artist and encouraged Dadd further. Dadd dedicated The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke to Haydon, gave it to him before he died at the age of 67 in 1886. The late poet Siegfried Sassoon, who gave it to London's Tate Gallery in 1963, inherited it indirectly from Haydon.

The picture is a savagely forged transmutation of folk legend into macabre personal obsession. The oddly grayish canvas depicts at least 44 fantastically garbed elves, sprites, gnomes, and pixies. Some are so tiny that they can hardly be distinguished beneath leaves or behind other fairies' shoulders. And most have peculiarly distorted heads, eyes, breasts or calves. All are watching the fairy feller, who is about to cleave a hazelnut in two with his mighty ax.