Lot 219: Richard Dadd (1819-1887)

The Haunt of the Fairies
oil on canvas, painted oval
23 7/8 x 20 in. (60.6 x 50.8 cm.)

Brighton, Brighton Museum, Fairies, 1980, no. D23.
Edinburgh, The Fine Art Society; and Glasgow, The Fine Art Society, 32 Victorian Paintings from the Forbes Collection at The Fine Art Society, 1981.
The Pre-Raphaelites and their Times, 1985, no. 65.
London, Royal Academy; Iowa, University of Iowa Museum of Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; and New York, Frick Collection, Victorian Fairy Painting, 1997-8, no. 22.

C. Haddon, The Fairy Kingdom, London and Sydney, 1998, p. 77, illus.
C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 81-2, illus. p. 80.

with Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, 1854-6.
Anonymous sale; [William Cox, 57 Pall Mall], Christie's, London, 15 February 1884 (third day), lot 439 (15 gns to Henry John Armstrong).
The Fine Art Society, London, by November 1977.
The Forbes Sale of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art; Christie's, London, 19 and 20 February 2003, lot 86 (£40,000, to the present owner).

No Victorian exponent of fairy painting was more remarkable than Richard Dadd. He was less prolific than Noel Paton or J.A. Fitzgerald, the other most considerable talents involved, but his mental disturbance took the genre to a level of intensity which they were unable to touch. To compare their work with his is to experience a vivid illustration of Coleridge's famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination.

Dadd's greatest fairy pictures are the two masterpieces he painted in Bethlam Hospital after going mad and murdering his father in 1843: Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8; Private Collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64; Tate Britain). However, in the years immediately preceding his commital, he painted a small group of fairy subjects, of which The Haunt of the Fairies is one. Others are Titania Sleeping (Musée du Louvre, Paris), shown at the Royal Academy in 1841; Puck (Private Collection), which appeared at the Society of British Artists the same year; and 'Come unto these Yellow Sands' (Private Collection), exhibited at the R.A. in 1842. Superficially these paintings appear more conventional than Contradiction or The Fairy Feller, but they too betray a disturbing and slightly sinister quality, eminently suited to their subjects, which seem to anticipate the tragedy of 1842. The menacing canopy of bat's wings which overhangs the action in Titania Sleeping is a good example.

A smaller version of The Haunt of the Fairies, entitled Evening, was included in the Richard Dadd Exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1974, no. 60, illustrated.

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