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), partially obscured by a large fellow in a peasant’s smock, as 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 bearded patriarch below, 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.’ The Pope is another kind of father: the Holy Father.

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: Charles 1, executed on Tuesday 30th January 1649.

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.

Freddie Mercury, admiring this painting in the Tate, wrote a song about it. Queen 2 is something between a Fantasy-themed concept album—a battle between ogres and fairies, a quest, the ‘fairy feller’ swinging his axe, in the Fantasy kingdom of Rhye—and a suite of songs accumulated separately that happen to share a vibe. Side One is ‘White’ and is Brian May compositions; Side Two is ‘Black’, Mercury indulges his fey enchantments and fairy chansons: ‘Ogre Battle’, ‘The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke’, ‘Nevermore’, ‘The March of the Black Queen’, ‘Seven Seas of Rhye’. What Fantasy as a mode ‘does’ for Mercury is open an enchanted and enchanting playground. He does not see in Dadd’s canvas parricide, but sex. Fairy, as with the band’s name ‘queen’, involves the appropriation of homophobic slurs to a celebration of queer desire. The song’s lyrics see in the elements of the image sexual engagement: one man ‘ploughing’ another, ‘waggoner will’—the pun on will as old as Shakespeare—a ‘politician with senatorial pipe’ (the phallic significance of which is emphasises by the dildoesque follow up ‘he's a dilly-dally-o’).

And a satyr peers under lady's gown, dirty fellow
What a dirty laddio
… Fairy dandy tickling the fancy of his lady friend

The ‘tickling’ brings out the double-meaning in ‘stroke’:—‘can we see the master stroke?’ Mercury sings, ambiguously phrased between ‘master-stroke’ as a noun, and ‘the master stroke [his …]’ as a verbal phrase. ‘What a quaere fellow’ the song exclaims, Mercury pronouncing the word ‘queer-y’. In an interview with Mojo magazine Roger Taylor declared that this strange word had nothing to do with Mercury’s sexuality, but we can take that with a pinch of salt. Queen’s ‘Bicycle Race’ is a song about riding a pushbike, but it is also a song about being ‘bi’ and ‘riding’ in a sexual sense. As a descriptor ‘rock and roll’ has more than one meaning. The production on this song, and indeed the whole album—multi-layered, intricate, overdubbed and crowded— provides an aural correlative to the visual textures of Dadd’s canvas.