Fairies : The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke

In the tradition of the Romantic poets, the medievalist reveries of the Pre-Raphaelites are seen as ways of liberating passions in the face of a techno-scientific world in which only wealth and numbers count. These dreamlike wanderings lead to visions that are often beautiful, full of vivid colours, sometimes melancholy, and, more rarely, bordering on the nightmarish. Richard Dadd, hospitalized in a psychiatric institution in 1843 after murdering his father, was certainly inspired to paint his fairies by William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream , but they also express the feeling of estrangement of the fantasized Middle Ages carried by the Pre-Raphaelites, a timeless era where reason is replaced by a bewitching magic that would sometimes lead to the edge of madness. All these elements would be taken up again at the end of the 20th century by the current of dark fantasy