Richard Dadd, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (1855–64)
Dadd painted this extraordinary Fantasy masterpiece in the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital — Bedlam — where he was confined for murdering his father. The painting is now in the Tate Britain, whose website explains the scene thuswise:
With the exception of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, who appear in the top half of the picture, the figures are drawn entirely from the artist’s imagination. The main focus of the painting is the Fairy Feller himself, who raises his axe in readiness to split a large chestnut which will be used to construct Queen Mab’s new fairy carriage. In the centre of the picture the white-bearded patriarch raises his right hand, commanding the woodsman not to strike a blow until the signal is given. Meanwhile the rest of the fairy band — figures including, as per the children’s rhyme, ‘soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, ploughboy, apothecary, thief’ and ranging from tiny gnats and centaurs to a large dragonfly playing a trumpet — surround him, many looking on in anticipation, anxious to see whether the woodsman will succeed in splitting the nut with one stroke.
Dadd murdered his Dad in August 1843, stabbing him with a knife. Father is portrayed in the image, at the top, holding a pestle over a large stone mortar (Robert Dadd was, by profession, a chemist), almost obscured by a large fellow in a peasant’s smock, whilst a young boy — presumably Richard as a child — reaches out towards his coat. What might be blood pours from the boy’s fingers. Robert Dadd is looking out of the image, at us, but he is holding the phallic pestle like a knife, ready to cut down, and the boy’s gesture might be supplication, or perhaps self-defence.
The patriarch, with his right hand up, is also almost obscured, this time by huge diagonal blades of grass. His left arm is fully outstretched, and his left hand clasps the top of a very phallic-looking upright twig. Francis Fowle, the Tate’s Art Historian, notes that ‘the magician-like figure of the patriarch wears a triple crown, which seems to be a reference to the Pope. Dadd saw the Pope during a visit to Rome in 1843 and was apparently overcome by an urge to attack him.’
It’s hard to avoid the sense that this image, ostensibly about cleaving a nut to make a fairy-queen’s carriage, is actually about killing the father. Like Dickens’s Mr Dick, from David Copperfield, who finds King Charles’ head creeping into everything, I cannot avoid seeing echoes here of the axeman beheading — a Freudian would say, castrating — the pater patriae, the father-king.
The crowd watch in anticipation; the soldiers stand by; the axe is raised.
The regicide was a popular topic for Victorian history painting, but here Dadd refracts it through fairy-fantasy, miniaturising it as if to rob it of its awful forces of guilt and regret. Yet the charm of this picture, its extraordinary inventiveness and horror vacui fulness can’t conceal how carceral it is — those grass stems like bars across the plane of view — and how sad: it’s so brown, so melancholic in hue. It’s even in the title: a ‘fairy feller’ might be a fairy who fells things, like trees, with his axe, and who is about to achieve a master-stroke with that tool; or it might be a fellow — feller as a slang variant of the word goes back to the nineteenth-century — a fairy (that is small) man, a boy, who swings his axe to deliver the coup-de-grace to his master, his king, his Pope, his father. So many severed heads, turned, as if by fairy magic, into acorns and bristly horse-chesnut cases littering the floor! So much slaughter.
