The painting is titled The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, and was painted by Dadd while he was taking some “me” time at Broadmoor Hospital [personal note to my friend Catherine: BROADMOOR! TONY! GAH!] after murdering his father and then attempting to murder some French guy while on the run in France.
Richard Dadd wasn’t a well man. (Maybe I should have started with that.)
He’s on my radar at all because he makes a quick and creepy appearance in a biography of Wilkie Collins called The King of Inventors by Catherine Peters. I like to keep track of things like credit card payment due dates, social engagements, and the anniversaries of the deaths of schizophrenics on my Yahoo! calendar, and today I got a reminder about Dadd.
Dadd was born 1 August 1817. He’s not part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but he’s Brotherhood-adjacent, because artists have always been great at three things: (1) annoying me, (2) writing ponderous “artist’s” statements, and (3) being incestuous as a group. He studied at the Royal Academy (which is part of the reason why Dadd wasn’t part of the PRB; that group of winners hated the Royal Academy and what it stood for SO MUCH that they gave the founder of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the devastating nickname “Sir Sloshua Reynolds.” If I had to add a (4) to my list of three things artists are great at, I think it would have to be devastating nicknames) where he ran into folks like Augustus Egg and E.M. Ward — both of whom show up frequently in Dickens biographies.
In 1842, he was picked to be a draughtsman for an expedition to Greece, Turkey, Syria, and, finally, Egypt. (And going off topic a moment to talk a little more about Egypt: Remember how great it was when Flaubert took that trip to Egypt with his probably-gay-as-pants friend Max and Flaubert was obsessed with the eunuchs and upset that they wouldn’t hang out with him — “What would I not have given in the Orient, to become the friend of a eunuch! But they are completely unapproachable.” — and Max kept taking pictures using an extremely attractive Nubian “for scale” but I mean, come on: we all know the pyramids are big.) And while it probably can’t entirely be blamed on Egypt, sometime in December, somewhere along the Nile, Richard Dadd started losing his mind, thinking he was under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris (the Egyptian god who was cut up into 14 pieces by his evil brother and then scattered over the world, forcing Osiris’s sister-wife to go searching and assembling only she couldn’t find Osiris’s penis because that had been swallowed by a crab oh my god you guys: think of how different Christmas could have been if we’d all been Egyptian).
His traveling companions attributed it to sunstroke. It was probably paranoid schizophrenia.
Back home, in August of 1843, Dadd murdered his father, thinking his father was the Devil in disguise (he wasn’t), but before that he went through a period where he was obsessed with hard-boiled eggs and “lived on nothing else” according to Peters in her Wilkie Collins bio. (I also love the way Peters describes the murder: “Dadd went spectacularly mad and cut his father’s throat.”)
After his arrest, after trying to kill that other guy in France (who probably also was the Devil in disguise as far as Dadd was concerned), and after he was safely hospitalized away (first at Bedlam before later being moved to Broadmoor [another personal note to my friend Catherine: BROADMOOR! TONY! GAH!]), the police searched his rooms and studio where they found “drawings of his friends, including Frith, Egg, and Ward…with a red slash painted across the throat of each.”
Go ahead and take some time to shudder thoroughly. I’ll wait right here, shuddering myself.
Oh, but I’m not quite done with the uncanny and creepy: as it turns out, years later, E.M. Ward, a narrative painter of British historical scenes, killed himself. By slashing his throat.
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7 January 2012 at 7:47 pm
Robin G.
What did the Royal Academy stand for?
7 January 2012 at 10:15 pm
Mike Bevel
It’s a little easier to start from the point of view of what the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stood for, and then back into the Royal Academy. (Also, full disclosure: I’m on the side of the Royal Academy here, and in most instances.)
The original Pre-Raphaelites were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; so, primarily painters, but the movement soon encompassed poets and some critics who were sympathetic to the cause. (The best example of a critic being a Pre-Raphaelite is John Ruskin, who championed the group when no one else wanted to, and thus earned an honorary membership which he probably later regretted, seeing as how Millais would later have an affair with Ruskin’s wife Effie. I went to a lecture at the National Gallery about the Pre-Raphaelites and the guy giving the talk, speaking to a roomful of people who seemed to be pretty pro-Pre-Raphaelite, said, “But there was one critic who did not appreciate the Brotherhood at all,” …and then he clicked the PowerPoint presentation one slide forward to an image of Charles Dickens and the entire room GASPED as if they had just learned that the sadistic calls to the babysitter were coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE. Dickens wasn’t a fan, but he wasn’t a fan because he assumed his readers wouldn’t be fans and once his opinion was challenged by Ruskin, he backed down from it pretty quickly.)
They were antagonistic towards established art and established ways of making art. As the name implies, they were suspicious of everything after Raphael and Michelangelo. The lyrical freedom of the Classical movement, they worried, had been lost to the mechanical and formulaic attitudes of the Mannerists.
They were also the first hipsters, making a point of dressing in older fashions and painting and living in the ways their heroes — specifically, Raphael — lived. They also often get the attribution of the first avant garde movement. My irritation with them certainly bears this out, since I can’t stand avant garde at all.
The Royal Academy was interested in teaching form and technique — two things specifically that the Pre-Raphaelites felt couldn’t be taught; in fact, thought it was offensive to even suggest that something so vital and integral could have such a pedantic genesis. Uncharitably, one could argue that the impetus behind the movement was the fact that none of the three founding members were successful in the Royal Academy.
Wilkie Collins’s brother, Charles, was an artist who desperately wanted to be considered as a member of the Brotherhood; however, Hunt, Millais, and Rosetti felt that he could not be trusted since his father, William Collins, had not only been a successful student of the Royal Academy (showing a penchant for landscape paintings, which were a giant NO THANK YOU for the Brotherhood), but later became a Royal Academician. The Brotherhood felt that Collins’s bloodline and talents had been tainted by too much of the Royal Academy culture.
9 January 2012 at 3:16 pm
Annette
I’m sorry? What did you say? I was distracted. The ladies of my family were taking the ornaments down from the Christmas Crab and deciding which gentleman of the family to introduce it to in the annual ending of the festivities ritual.
Yours, &c
A Lady Still Living