Neil, Saturday 12 April, 2008, 18:11 clock I was reminded yesterday, here is the introduction to Mark Chadbourn award-winning story The Fairy Feller's
Master Stroke Me and my Dadd and Mark Chadbourn.
My mind tells me that I have the image itself, titled mysteriously have
Fairy Feller's Master Stroke
, reprinted for the first time in full size with 14 or so on the foldout cover of a QUEEN album seen and it has ever made any impression on me. This is one of the strange things in this picture. It has to be in the original look, paint on canvas, the real, most often when it's not off in the space of Preraffaeliten at the Tate Gallery, somewhat lost amid the magnificent beauty of Preraffaeliten, all udn so much bigger elaborate than the modest Elfenhof, walking through the daisies to make it real. And when you see it, several things become clear, some immediately, some with time. early 20s when I was, I received a copy of a book for review, a book of photos of a Victorian doctor named Diamond, which he had gamcht by the inmates of Bedlam. Hopeless Spotted lunatics who struggle their hands while they wink at the camera straight faced and uncomfortable pose, as long as needed to expose the film, even if her hands fluttering like doves often blurred. Portraits of madness udn pain and in only one of the photos was a man, even a madman to see who actually did something.
The Man in the picture has a beard. He has an easel before him on which he is a small oval picture of astonishing delicacy He paints clever stares into the camera and his face is a small, sharp smile to see. His eyes shine. It looks squat and proud, and when I was a year later for the first time his masterpiece The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke in the original saw was the first thing I noticed that the dwarf is sad with the white beard, which dominates the center of the picture and stares at the viewer, the aged Richard Dadd. The people who visit the area of Preraffaeliten at the Tate Gallery do, the answer for their own reasons, and in some remote and melodic. The Waterhouse and Millais and Burne Joneses use their own magic: Spectators walk past the images, enriches their lives. The Dadd, however, is a trap, and those who have in their Selle a place for him are caught. You can actually spend hours front of the painting are lost in it, and wonder about the elves and goblins and men and women, try to surprise their size, their shape, their eccentricities ("Every time I look at me, I see something new." like Mark Chadbourne narrator Danny, often so unreliable, but reliable at this point, we are told).
Dadd knew who they were, the people in the painting. He knew their lives. He knew what they were. You know, when you see it.
If you have seen the painting prints only if you are on a journey to get just the view, then the next thing one surprised at the size. It is smaller than we thought - less than seems possible. It must fit in. after all, very much. The authorized printing of the Tate Gallery of The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke, which I bought after I had seen it, is almost twice as big as the painting itself.
And the painting is not the pressure. The image itself, in its context, has magic - in the colors, the detail - no picture, no posters, no postcard to take each begin to appear.
So on we look like Danny and his mother the picture and see every brush stroke.
And it can be for hours , A slightly different look before you notice about the painting, something so big and strange and obvious that one can not understand why you have not seen it once, or why no one else has said a word about it.
It is unfinished.
A large part of the lower part, where the color choices seem odd and washed are mapped only on the smooth brown of the canvas. The grass in beige, that draws attention to the cases, therefore, beige, because Dadd - out of many years to paint it - had no more time. He gave away before it was finished.
And there is another Thing you know, without question, if you look at the original look udn, namely that: he knew what he was painting. He had seen it, clever with those eyes. He had gone to the great journey, the greatest of all holidays, and that was what he brought back.
There was this feeling that one of the great mysteries of the universe could be released if it would be looked at long enough to understand the evidence, says Danny, Mark says, and they're right.
Before his madness, before the murder of his father, in front of a bad-fated trip to France (he was on the train to the attack was arrested on a fellow traveler on his way to Paris to kill the emperor) were Dadds paintings very pretty, and perfectly normal, ordinary chocolate box cover images of fairy scenes from Shakespeare. Nothing extraordinary. Nothing that the time would survive. Nothing real.
And then he was crazy. Not just a little crazy, but crazy spectacular, a father murderous madness of demons and ancient Egyptian gods. He spent the rest of his life behind bars - first in Bedlam, and later as one of the first prisoners of Broadmoor - and after a while he bagnn paint and exchanged his paintings for favors one. The box of chocolates elves had disappeared. Now it was his paintings of fairies, bible scenes, prison inmates (real or imagined) of such intensity that they do, we still have to make such resources. They were painted with such intensity and determination that it is scary.
He spent the rest of his life behind bars, locked up the mt dangerous lunatics, so dangerous crazy as any of them, but with a message for us, a message from the other side. Besides, his life was wasted.
However, he left us paintings, puzzles and an unfinished painting (The Tate by Siegfried Sassoon left, if I remember correctly) and which we continue to apply. Angela Carter wrote a radio play about the amazing picture, Dadds life, Victorian Arts:
Come Unto These Yellow Sands
. I've written a movie review, in which this image was the key, and once I was about to organize an anthology in which each action should Feller story of one of the witnesses of the chestnut-crushing blow of the Fairy. And now Mark Chadbourn gives us a novel in which the painting is a hint (maybe), a murder weapon (possible) and, above all, is unquestionably a key: a key to a Life, to a family, a secret to solutions to madness, and above all to the reality.
It is a story of a wasted life, a story about love and pain, and a place where paintings and Dadd Dadds life both a template udn be an excuse: a reason to live and a reason to die, and, last, we understand what we have read.
Does Mark Chadbourn history to answer the riddle of the elves cases and his masterful shock? Danny's mother certainly thinks so, but Danny himself recognizes that any response can only be a step on the road. That the secret of how the painting as our understanding of the painter will always remain unfinished. And that perhaps is the master stroke of them all ... Neil Gaiman
6th April 2002
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