NINE YEARS ON ONE LOCKED CANVAS

 

He worked on one corner of the painting for months at a time, building up dots of paint so thin and so many that the surface started to rise off the canvas like relief. It took him nine years. He never finished it. He wasn't allowed to leave the room where he was painting it, and neither was the man he'd already killed with a knife.

Richard Dadd began The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke in 1855, inside the criminal lunatic wing of Bethlem Royal Hospital — Bedlam. This July, London's Royal Academy of Arts opens the first major UK survey of his work in over a decade, bringing together more than one hundred pieces under a title that names the place plainly: Beyond Bedlam.

Dadd was not, whatever his later reputation suggested, an outsider to the art world. He was a prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at twenty, won medals for draftsmanship, and ran with the same rising painters who would go on to define Victorian art. In 1842 a wealthy patron invited him on a Grand Tour through Europe and the Middle East as the expedition's draftsman. By the time they reached Egypt, something in Dadd had come loose. He grew violent toward his patron, became convinced that the god Osiris had ordered him to destroy the devil, and in Rome had to be restrained from attacking the Pope.

His family brought him home to recover. In August 1843, Dadd stabbed his father to death, having decided the man was the devil in disguise. He was arrested and returned to England. Under a newly established test for criminal insanity, he was never tried for murder. He was simply confined — first at Bethlem, then, twenty years later, at the newly built Broadmoor — for the remaining forty-three years of his life.

It was at Bethlem that a hospital steward named George Henry Haydon noticed Dadd was still, unmistakably, a painter. Haydon supplied him with materials and commissioned a "fairy painting." What Dadd delivered, over nine years of obsessive labor, was something closer to a locked room than a fairy tale: a chestnut-splitting woodsman surrounded by dozens of invented figures, every blade of grass rendered with the precision of a religious relic.

Art historians have never entirely agreed on one detail. Partly obscured near the top of the canvas is a bearded figure holding a pestle over a mortar — the exact tools of a chemist, which is what Dadd's father had been by trade. Dadd himself, in a long 1865 poem meant to explain the painting, named every character and then explicitly refused to say what any of it meant.

The painting left Bethlem without him in 1864. He immediately painted a watercolor duplicate from memory, just to have a version with him at Broadmoor.

The original eventually passed into the hands of the WWI poet Siegfried Sassoon, who gave it to the Tate in 1963 in memory of three brothers named Dadd, two killed in the war and the third dead by suicide decades later. A decade after that, a young Freddie Mercury stood in front of the canvas, read Dadd's poem, and wrote a song borrowing its exact lines.

Mercury's song insists the painting is about wonder. Dadd's own poem insists it means nothing at all. Which of them was closer to the truth — or was the real answer that a man who once killed his father spent nine years, one dot of paint at a time, making sure no one could ever prove which one of them was right?