The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke
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| The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke |
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| Richard Dadd , 1855-1864 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 54 × 39.5 cm |
| Tate Gallery |
The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke ( The Master Stroke of the Elven Lumberjack or The Master Stroke of the Witch Lumberjack ) is a painting by Richard Dadd . It is considered one of his most important works. The painting is in the Tate Gallery in London .
Emergence
It took Dadd nine years to create the painting, one of his most significant works. The painting was created between 1855 and 1864. At that time the artist was in the Bethlem Royal Hospital because he had murdered his father in a delusional manner . It was commissioned by George Henry Hayden, who was then administrator at Bethlem Royal Hospital.
Dadd worked with microscopic accuracy and a layering technique so the painting appears to have 3-D effects. The painting is only 54 × 39.5 cm in size.
To put the painting in a fictional context, Dadd wrote a poem called Elimination of a Picture & Its Subject . In the poem, each person depicted is given a name and a background, with allusions to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and old English folk tales and fairy tales being interwoven.
Description of the painting
The painter depicts a scene from the world of fairies and elves , which is based on the plays Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare .
In Romeo and Juliet , Mercutio tells of his dream:
“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies 'midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
[…]
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she 'gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love ... ”
The scenery of the painting is based on this:
The fairy world has gathered to watch the woodcutter (32) split a hazelnut (31) from which a carriage is to be made for the fairy Queen Mab (12). He's just raising the ax for his master stroke.
Other people in the picture are:
Works inspired by the painting
Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen composed a rock song of the same name, inspired by this work. He is included on the 1974 album Queen II .
The author Terry Pratchett also takes up the image in his novel Little Free Men and lets the main character Tiffany enter the image in Chapter 11. In the afterword he writes about the picture: "It looks very strange - it seems to radiate summer warmth".
The work of the same name by the author Marc Chadbourn was published on June 30, 2002 by PS Publishing in England.
See also
Web links
- Excerpts from the poem in the context of Shakespeare from the English Department of Emory University
- Richard A. Schindler: Fairy Painting after 1850 at The Victorian Web
Notes and sources
- ↑ Elimination is to be understood as a play on words on illumination , cf. Richard A. Schindler: Fairy Painting after 1850 .