As it climbs, he dares to deliver...
Cathy
..............
Flittering in the Dells: The English penchant for painting fairies makes
for a worthwhile, if peculiar, exhibition
By ROBERT HUGHES
COULD YOU THINK OF A DOTTIER notion for an exhibition than the one now
in the lower rooms of the Frick Collection in New York City: "Victorian
Fairy Painting"? All those little homunculi and chaste, pocketsize
cuties with gauzy wings, flittering about the mossy dells and twiggy
bowers of the sentimental English imagination—
aargh, spare us. We are so much smarter now, anyway: instead of fairies
we
believe in close encounters of the third kind, with aliens sticking
shiny probes into overweight housewives whisked from the parking lot of
the 7-Eleven. And yet, even granting that the show (which was a big hit
at the Royal Academy in London, and has since been seen in Iowa City and
Toronto) is very much cut down from its original form, it is still a
worthwhile curiosity and has interesting things to say about the
peculiarities of Victorian culture—with implications for our own.
Fairies, as Stella Beddoe makes clear in a beguiling catalog essay, are
so much a fixture of English literature that it's no surprise they
infiltrated English painting as well. In the 14th century Chaucer, via
the Wife of Bath, was already pointing out that the elf queen and her
company had retreated from human contact "manye hundred yeres ago," but
their popular life continued to be irrepressible. Shakespeare is full of
them—A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest. They pullulate as sylphs in
Pope's Rape of the Lock; they appear in the verses of Drayton, Herrick,
Milton, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley and Blake. Indeed, whenever national
origins were celebrated under the aegis of
the Romantic movement, with its passion for the primitive and
antiquarian, there the fairies (a.k.a. trolls, elves, pixies,
leprechauns, peris) would be.
They colonized the English stage, floating across it on (hopefully)
invisible wires as actor-managers put their casts through ever more
ethereal effects of movement and stage lighting; their defiance of
gravity was to popular theater what the computer generation of dinosaurs
and space oddities is to movies today. Arthur Conan Doyle was the son of
a fairy painter, Charles Altamont Doyle, who died mad, but the creator
of Sherlock Holmes was so gullible himself that as late as 1917 he
defended some fake photos of fairies made by an enterprising pair of
teenage English schoolgirls. You'd almost suppose that the national
emblem of England was neither the lion nor the unicorn nor even John
Bull, but the fairy.
But the dingly dells of Titania and Queen Mab bordered on the badlands
of sex, drugs and hallucination. The last two, especially, were never
far away, and all three pervade Christina Rossetti's extraordinary
narrative poem of the symbolic rape of a girl by the "Little People,"
Goblin Market. In painting the action was milder, but fairies were shown
appearing in dreams to maidens whose sleep, as the phials by the bedside
make clear, was induced by opiates. Then there were the magic mushrooms,
which famously appear in Sir John Tenniel's illustration for Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland—the stoned-out caterpillar sitting on one,
puffing at his hookah—and more obscurely in Thomas Heatherley's Fairy
Seated on a Mushroom, circa 1860.
Heatherley's odd pastiche, which is in the Frick show, derives equally
from Ingres (the nude back) and Hieronymus Bosch (the queer goblin
figures). Fairy painters had constant recourse to Bosch and his various
16th century imitators and copyists, including Pieter Bruegel whose
fantasies they could get from prints. A very minor artist, John Anster
Fitzgerald (1823-1906), copied some of his elfin sprites directly from
Bosch—witness the pair of legs protruding from an egg in Fairies in a
Bird's Nest, circa 1860. The oddest thing about the painting, though, IS
not its somewhat routine litde monsters but its frame, a bizarre
curiosity of gilded twigs.
Some of England's best 19th century artists painted fairies, though not
regularly; J.M.W. Turner did a Queen Mab's Cave, and Sir Edwin Landseer
produced a scene of Titania enthralled by the donkeyheaded Bottom. But
these were spin-offs. By far the best of the fairy painters, and by an
equally long way the weirdest, was Richard Dadd (1817-86). A gene of
madness ran in his family. Two of Dadd's brothers and one sister were to
die insane. Dadd himself, after a mildly promising early career as a
landscape and narrative painter, began in his late 20s to suffer acute
and agonizing delusions of persecution by devils and to believe he was
under the power of the Egyptian god Osiris. In 1843, in the throes of
his mania, he stabbed his father, an apothecary, to death and fled to
France; he was caught, brought back certified insane and condemned to
life in Bedlam, the English state lunatic asylum.
Like an earlier, literary figure, the English poet Christopher Smart,
Dadd produced his best work in the madhouse. His masterpiece was a small
but incredibly detailed canvas called Me Fairy Feller's Master Stroke.
Left not quite finished in 1864, it took him nine years to do. He wrote
a detailed explanation of the swarming figures in it, which bear no
relation to any other painting or existing literary work. This is not an
illustration; it was spun gradually out of the artist's head, in
accordance with a process of free association that the Surrealists would
have recognized and that Leonardo da Vinci had prefigured when he
advised the artist to imagine forms from random blots of rain, mildew or
spittle. We are looking into a tiny clear space in the grass. Stems of
grass weave across the view. Dozens of figures—some are tiny,
recognizable English types, others exotic—are watching the Fairy Feller,
or woodsman, with his ax raised to split a hazelnut. There is nothing
cute about these figures. They are all human in form yet obsessively
"other." They're not demonic exactly, but they have a scary presence.
One might not be wrong to infer Dadd's own terror of sex, for instance,
from the implacably swollen breasts and hamlike legs of the
servingwomen—if that's what they are—on the left. The paint is
meticulous, low toned, and seems stitched like tapestry. Every detail,
from the petals of the daisies to the last button on the costumes, gets
the same weight of scrutiny. The light is dim and dense, like the
strange no-color light that accompanies a solar eclipse. Of all the
artists in this show, Dadd is the only one who convinces you that he saw
what he painted and painted what he saw— suffering and alone, there in
his cell in Bedlam.
........
The article was also accompanied by a picture that looked to be
approximately 2 1/2" by 4". Do your own metric conversions.
So you see, no comment on our friend who was so inspired by this
painting that he built an entire song around it, but a very informative
article nonetheless. I wonder what it was about this painting, out of
all the paintings at the Frick exhibit, that made the author spend so
much time explaining this particular one in detail? I have a feeling
that Mr. Hughes is indeed a Queen fan. Mention of our little quartet
would not have been integral to the rest of the article, and I believe
this is why this fact may have been omitted.
I do plan on visiting the museum in the very near future to see the
exhibit.
And no, I didn't type all of that up there.
Cathy
Baraka Jaden
Cathy wrote:
> This from the November 23, 1998 issue of "Time" magazine:
> ..............
>
> Flittering in the Dells: The English penchant for painting fairies makes
> for a worthwhile, if peculiar, exhibition
>
> By ROBERT HUGHES
(snip- most of review)
> this is why this fact may have been omitted.\]
An alternate explanation is that the painting is so powerful that it not
only inspired Freddie to write a song about it, but it also compelled this
reviewer to describe it. Maybe Dadd's mad vision is contagious.
Molly
Cathy
>
> This from the November 23, 1998 issue of "Time" magazine:
> ..............
>
> Flittering in the Dells: The English penchant for painting fairies makes
> for a worthwhile, if peculiar, exhibition
>
> By ROBERT HUGHES
>
> COULD YOU THINK OF A DOTTIER notion for an exhibition than the one now
> in the lower rooms of the Frick Collection in New York City: "Victorian
> Fairy Painting"? All those little homunculi and chaste, pocketsize
> cuties with gauzy wings, flittering about the mossy dells and twiggy
> bowers of the sentimental English imagination—
> aargh, spare us. We are so much smarter now, anyway: instead of fairies
> we
> believe in
> Like an earlier, literary figure, the English poet Christopher Smart,
> Dadd produced his best work in the madhouse. His masterpiece was a small
> but incredibly detailed canvas called Me Fairy Feller's Master Stroke.
> Left not quite finished in 1864, it took him nine years to do. He wrote
> a detailed explanation of the swarming figures in it, which bear no
>
Lesson #1: Never fully rely on your spellchecker to make sure your post
is ready to fly. It may pick out the incorrectly spelled words, but
can't read your mind.
Case in point: the text-reading software I used to scan the article read
the name of Dadd's work "*Me* Fairy Feller's Masterstroke" instead of
"The". Of course, I had to post this correction, especially since it is
not your ordinary run-of-the-mill proofreading mistake.
Haven't I always maintained that when I was wrong, I'd be the first to
tell you??
I remain,
Cathy
Cathy
> An alternate explanation is that the painting is so powerful that it not
> only inspired Freddie to write a song about it, but it also compelled this
> reviewer to describe it. Maybe Dadd's mad vision is contagious.
>
> Molly
....
Maybe. We all have mad visions. Some of them more nonsensical than
others, but then sometimes those are the ones that are pure genious, and
they outweigh the nutty ones by far. And perhaps that is why some of us
are so drawn to the song as well?
Mmmmwwwuhahahahahahahaaaaaa!!!
Cathy(as always, walkin' the line…)
Jackie
>An alternate explanation is that the painting is so powerful that it not
>only inspired Freddie to write a song about it, but it also compelled this
>reviewer to describe it. Maybe Dadd's mad vision is contagious.
Yeah. I like to think that Dadd's mad vision is a tad bad myself.
Phew, what a sad cad! ;-)
Jackie.
Baraka Jaden
Jackie wrote:
Apparently, he was also dangerous to know.
Molly
Steve Ziegelmeyer
If you haven't seen the painting, you can find it here:
http://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/cgfa/d/p-dadd1.htm
-Steve Ziegelmeyer-