After Richard Dadd

The work of the distinctive Victorian painter Richard Dadd (1817-1886) seems to have had a particular resonance for Freddie, who recurrently delved into to its rich world of teeming eeriness. Dadd learned his trade at the Royal Academy of Arts, firmly anchoring him in the nineteenth-century academic tradition of precise, exact draughtsmanship. His early work demonstrates this influence more clearly, but upon returning from his travels in the East, he steered his work in a wholly new direction and tended to work increasingly from memory or imagination. In this later period, which encompasses his most famous works, Dadd produced dense, folkloric scenes that tended to blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. 

While Freddie’s art collection included numerous paintings that embodied popular taste and aesthetics of the Victorian era, including works by Tissot and Blaas, he also seems to have been drawn to Dadd’s oblique perspective on the period’s norms and his readiness to create art in a significantly more unconventional style. One of Dadd’s paintings in particular, the large-scale 1855-64 work The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, was a fruitful source of inspiration on which Freddie based a song of the same name in the album Queen II (1974). This painting, completed during Dadd’s time at Broadmoor psychiatric ward, is a bustling, theatrical composition of fantastical, imagined creatures; Freddie delights in recounting their enigmatic activity with nursery-rhyme lyrics that often have a playful, Lewis Carroll-like absurdity.

Dadd was an artistic maverick who was clearly a deeply troubled man – modern historians sometimes theorise that Dadd was, in fact, suffering from what we would today call schizophrenia. His illness was misunderstood during his lifetime, with many believing that heat-stroke was the cause of the abrupt, often dramatic changes to his personality. It is intriguing to observe in Freddie a strong receptiveness to the mythical fantasy of this visionary social outsider living a century before he did, and to trace the link between Freddie’s chosen sources of visual inspiration and his highly unique musical and performative style.