Overview
The Spring Term lecture The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke: The Story of an Eccentric Masterpiece will be given by Dr Nick Tromans, MA Art History and Art World Practice Programme Director.The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is the best-known work to have survived from the hand of Richard Dadd, the Victorian fairy painter and asylum patient. Created for one of the senior staff at Bethlem Hospital in London, where Dadd lived for some twenty years, the Fairy Feller has become one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century. Apparently a scarcely decipherable jumble of fantastic figures, the picture in fact has its own logic rooted in Shakespeare and the realities of asylum life.
This talk sets out to interpret the Fairy Feller, using Dadd's own writings as a guide. It will also trace the extraordinary history of the work, from Bethlem to the collection of the poet Siegfried Sassoon who donated the painting to the Tate in 1963 in memory of three brothers, relations of Dadd's, with whom Sassoon had served during World War One.
Please register to attend this free event.