THE VICTORIAN ARTIST WHO PAINTED FAIRY WORLDS FROM AN ASYLUM

Alina Cohen

Richard Dadd, Come unto These Yellow Sands, 1842. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The Victorian artist Richard Dadd painted exquisite, highly detailed canvases filled with fairies and other magical creatures. In his best-known work, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (ca. 1855–64), flowers, leaves, and stalks of grass unfurl across the canvas, giving way to a magical world of miniature figures in fanciful dresses and crowns. They gather around a brown-suited gentleman who’s about to cleave an acorn in two with an ax. Yet this central act of violence eerily corresponds to Dadd’s earlier misdeeds: In 1843, in a bout of madness, he killed his father, then assaulted a tourist on a train on his escape. He spent the rest of his life in institutions; the asylum became his studio, where he produced most of his imaginative paintings.

An 1878 census from the United Kingdom lists Dadd as both an “artist” and a “lunatic.” In Victorian England, the latter term was a perfectly acceptable catch-all for sufferers of mental illness. Dadd was hardly the first painter or sculptor with such a diagnosis. Indeed, philosophers and physicians have investigated the link between creativity and madness for millennia. Plato even philosophized about the topic in ancient Greece. Artistic inspiration, he believed, was God-given madness. From Vincent van Gogh hacking off his own ear to Sylvia Plath’s suicide-by-oven, many of our most lauded creative practitioners are, for better or for worse, also remembered for their intense manias and depressions. Dadd offers one of the most tragic examples of inventive brilliance coupled with (poorly treated) mental illness.

Dadd’s early life was unremarkable. He was born in Kent in 1817, and his family moved to London when he was 18. Two years later, he enrolled in the Royal Academy. Dadd became friendly with the up-and-coming painters of his day: Augustus Egg

, William Powell Frith, and Edward Matthew Ward, among others. He received awards for his draughtsmanship, and during this time, he was focused on a fairly traditional series of Shakespearean illustrations. In the early 1840s, he painted fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck and Titania, the queen of the fairies. His 1842 canvas Come Unto These Yellow Sands takes inspiration from The Tempest. In sum, Dadd fit neatly into Britain’s well-heeled creative scene.

Portrait of Richard Dadd painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, ca. 1856. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

“I think he was very much of his time, right up until he killed his father,” Marc Demarest, who maintains a popular web page about Dadd, told Artsy. Demarest became interested in the artist after seeing The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke at the Tate (where it’s in the permanent collection) in 2005. The obsessive detail, most of all, piqued his curiosity. “It’s not a painting that you can take in in 5 minutes or 15 minutes,” he said. “I still don’t know what it means. When you stand a foot and a half from it and peer into actual work, it’s pretty magical.”

Dadd’s life took its sad, strange turn during a trip across Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The pair embarked in July 1842, crossing the Alps and exploring Venice before setting sail to Greece, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), Cyprus, Beirut, and Jerusalem, among other cities. Dadd began suffering from headaches. After seeing impressions of the Egyptian god Osiris in Cairo, he also became paranoid, threatening Phillips; Dadd apparently believed he’d been tasked with fighting the devil……………….

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-victorian-artist-painted-fairy-worlds-asylum?utm_medium=email&utm_source=14969835-newsletter-editorial-daily-11-03-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V