The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke by Richard Dadd

Before his madness, before the murder of his father, before the ill-fated journey to France (he was arrested on a train, when he attacked a fellow passenger, on his way to Paris to kill the Emperor) Dadd’s paintings are quite pretty, and perfectly ordinary: forgettable chocolate box cover concoctions of fairy scenes from Shakespeare. Nothing special or magical about them. Nothing that would make them last. Nothing true.

And then he went mad. Not just a little bit mad, but quite spectacularly mad; a murderous patricidal madness of demons and Egyptian gods. He spent the rest of his life locked up — first in Bedlam, later one of the first prisoners in Broadmoor — and, after a while, he began to paint, trading his paintings for favours. Gone were the chocolate box fairies. Now there was an intensity to his paintings and drawings of fairy courts, of bible scenes, of his fellow inmates (real or imaginary), that makes those we have such treasures. They were worked on with an intensity and single-mindedness that is, quite simply, scary.

[From Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, by Mark Chadbourn]

The story behind this curious painting is pretty fascinating.