Page 105 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Richard Dadd: The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke 1864 + Port Stragglin 1861.
Dadd was a founder and lead painter of the group of artists known as The Clique (with Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith etc). On a painting assignment in Egypt he became strangely delusional, believing himself to be under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris. He was returned to England and sent to convalesce in the countryside in Kent. But things got worse. In 1843 believing his father was the devil he killed him, fled to France and attacked a tourist there. He was condemned as a criminal lunatic in Bethelem Hospital (Bedlam), then at Broadmoor, where he was kindly treated and allowed to paint. It was during this period that he embarked on his fairy paintings (above left), and his remarkable watercolours and marine paintings - including Port Stragglin (above right). Despite his illness (paranoid schizophrenia) Dadd’s work fits into an interesting strand of Victorian painting - a strand that includes Henri Fuseli, Richard Doyle, John Anster Fitzgerald, and later the brilliant Arthur Rackham.
In a time when the barriers between life and death weren’t readily mitigated by medicine - except perhaps by tincture of morphine (Laudanum), it’s not surprising that there was a taste for fantasy and a longing for the more ‘perfect’ world of dreams and visions - and the reassuring fact that this longing had already been awarded cultural respectability by no less an authority than Shakespeare - perhaps accounts for the popularity of the fairy painting genre. Later in the century, the revival and popularity of ‘spiritism’ and ‘spirit photography’, mystical seances, spirit-writing and the like, led to the foundation of the academically semi-respectable Society for Psychical Research (1882), with members including the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (who played a key role in the invention of Radio), the pioneering psychologist William James, and the chemist Sir William Crookes (the inventor of the Crookes Tube - the foundational invention of the cathode-ray tube, the core of what would become the television set). It was the writer and Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also a member of the Society for Psychical Research, who was convinced for a while of the veracity of the ‘ Cottingly Fairy’ photographs made by two young girls in Yorkshire, in 1917.