Richard Dadd: how a murderer found salvation in fairies
Victorian artist Richard Dadd’s painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke has cultural echoes to this day. The work inspired musical tributes from Queen and Swedish doom metal band Candlemass and continues to be his most famous creation, woven into scenes penned by Terry Pratchett and hung on the walls of the Tate. Were it not for a psychotic break that saw him stab his own father to death, Dadd might have been the most popular artist in the Victorian fairy painting canon. Instead, he was forced into the shadows to wallow in his own darkness, becoming an outsider artist and painting his defining work from Broadmoor.
In 1842, Dadd travelled the Nile by boat. His personality had completely splintered in the time it took to make that journey. He became increasingly paranoid, delusional and violent. He swore he was being spoken to by the Egyptian god Osiris, the lord of the underworld and its dead. Osiris was said to be the son of Ra, the sun god, who he joined in death by ascending to the sky. Initially, it was thought Dadd was suffering from heatstroke.
That diagnosis changed when he returned to England in 1943. Declared to be of unsound mind, he was taken away by his family to rest. His family were anticipating – hoping – that the hooks of Osiris might have loosened now Dadd was home. It became horrifically clear his delusional thinking was actually escalating when he joined his father for a walk one evening and didn’t seem to take in the scenery at all.
Dadd couldn’t bring himself to admire his surroundings because he had become troubled by the idea that his father was actually the devil. Walking side by side with him through the rural village, the darkness that had overtaken him since Eygpt was excised in a flurry of punches and the wet sound of a stab. After killing his father in the midst of what would now considered a schizophrenic break, the panic didn’t subside.
Instead, it drove Dadd to France, where, on the way to Paris, he tried to kill a nearby passenger with a razor. After his arrest, he confessed to killing his father and was taken to Bedlam. In the seclusion of the psychiatric hospital, Dadd didn’t find himself communicating with Ephytian deities or the devil. He was conjuring up far safer worlds, quite literally letting himself get away with the fairies.
He painted them with such detail that The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke took Dadd nine years to complete, which included a transfer to Broadmoor. His visions were bohemian, romantic, and so precisely painted that it seemed almost impossible, he dreamt up the scene from his room. When he was healthy, his vivid imagination allowed him to create ethereal wonderlands. When he wasn’t, it became something darker, not an artistic tool, but a weapon.
He somehow plumbed the depths of Osiris’ underworld and emerged wanting to paint something so beautiful it was shocking, letting delicate fairies fuse the light and dark of his life. A census taken a few years before his death in Broadmoor pointed to that strange counterbalance, listing Dadd as both a “lunatic” and an “artist”.
