Richard Dadd

(British, 1817-1886)

The Haunt of the Fairies canvas size 61 x 51cm (24 x 20in); sight size 57 x 47.5 cm (22 7/16 x 18 11/16in).

Footnotes

Provenance
With Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, 1854-6.
William Cox, 57 Pall Mall.
Anon. sale, Christie's, London, 15 February 1884, lot 439 (15 gns to Henry John Armstrong, Glasgow).
Anthony Armstrong, Glasgow.
With The Fine Art Society, London, November 1977.
Sale, Christie's, London, 'The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art', 19 February 2003, lot 86.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above sale).

Exhibited
Brighton, Brighton Museum, Fairies, 1980, no. D23.
Edinburgh and London, The Fine Art Society, 32 Victorian Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection, 1981.
Tokyo, The Tokyo Shimbun, The Pre-Raphaelites and their Times, 1983, no. 65.
London, Royal Academy, Victorian Fairy Painting 1997-8, no. 22 (touring to Iowa, University of Iowa Museum of Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; and New York, Frick Collection).

Literature
C. Haddon, The Faerie Kingdom, London and Sydney, 1998, illustrated p. 77.
C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 81-82, illus. p. 80.


The Haunt of the Fairies belongs to a small group of fairy paintings Dadd produced in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The present work highlights the artist's unique imagination and vision within the field of Victorian fairy painting. There is a more human intensity to his work unlike the wonderful, but fanciful pictures of the other key proponents of this genre, Noel Paton and John Anster Fitzgerald. Dadd's work is simultaneously beautiful, magical and inviting, whilst also possessing an air of malevolence. Here for example, we have disturbed the supernatural creature who has emerged from her haunt to adorn her hair with flowers; a mystical scene, but her gaze now locks on to ours and she raises a slight smile, all of which brings intensity to the subject. Dadd's sensitivity towards these subjects has been attributed to his fragile mental state, a state that would come to a tragic climax in the years immediately following this painting.

In 1843, having suffered a severe mental breakdown now attributed to paranoid schizophrenia, and convinced that he was the Devil in disguise, Dadd murdered his father. Whilst trying to flee the country he was apprehended by police and later that year committed to Bethlem psychiatric hospital where he would spend the next 20 years of his life, before being committed to Broadmoor hospital where he died in 1886. It is whilst at Bethlem, known at the time as Bedlam, that Dadd continued working on the theme of fairies and completed his most significant paintings, notably Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8, private collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64, Tate Britain). The present work can be seen as a precursor to his obsessively detailed works of this time.

A smaller version of the present lot, titled Evening, was exhibited at the Tate Gallery, London, The Late Richard Dadd, June-August, 1984, no. 60 (touring to Hull, Wolverhampton, and Bristol). A Tate gallery label on the reverse of the present lot, which lists the owner as Armstrong and the title as Evening suggests that it may have been submitted for the exhibition, but not included.