The Fairy Feller's Masterstroke (FFM) (in the Tate collection) Richard Dadd, a Victorian gentleman, a convicted murderer and patient at the famous Bedlam asylum, spent nine years carefully crafting his masterpiece. He wrote a guidebook for it and insisted that each of the hundred characters in the painting is assigned a special task. What does he mean? Well, Neil Gaiman, among others, was inspired by this painting (it influenced the Sandman) and considers it a life-long obsession. He also wrote the introduction to a new book being published about the painting as a gateway to the supernatural world.

A bit of background: Dadd was a painter of Victorian Fairy Art. The obsession with fairies was like a fever that overtook the Victorian Mind. Another painter of note was Richard Doyle, the uncle of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes). A.C. Doyle himself was involved in a fascinating controversy that raged at the time. the Cottingley fairies, in which two young girls circulated photos of themselves with fairies. Doyle proclaimed that the photos "represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character" Unfortunately for Doyle, it was the former though the hoax was hardly ingenious, relying on cardboard cutouts and the will to believe.
posted by vacapinta on Jul 18, 2002 - 18 comments