Is there a weirder modern painting than Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke? There’s the hypnotic swirl of the structure — dotted with daisies — behind a barricade of stems. There’s the preposterous miniaturisation of the fairy world, for the action centres on the cracking of a hazelnut to make a carriage for the fairy Queen Mab. There is the scattering of monstrosities among the little folk — the couple with heads squashed into their necks; the strange old man under the earthen ledge surveying the scene; the even tinier folk in the earth layer above him and the pathetic chap with a white beard staring into the distance like a lunatic, which is apt enough since it was done in an asylum. The peculiar perspective, the hallucinatory detail, the swirling composition make the thing unforgettable.
That’s Dadd for you. Mad as a hatter, but quite possibly a genius. Alexander Pope’s observation about great wits being to madness near allied is borne out in Dadd. He stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park to liberate the Egyptian god Osiris in 1843 (he told the stars, “Go tell the great god Osiris I have done the deed which is to set him free”), and spent the next 40 years in asylums, first Bedlam then Broadmoor, where his painting, if not his career, continued.
