Image via Wikipedia
These past few weeks have mainly seen me flitting between three writing projects. The first, Return to Earth draft 2 - still not quite complete (six pages to go!); the second, developing an idea for a TV series based on the bits I’ve cut out of the first draft of Return to Earth; and thirdly, the just-for-fun adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’.
Now, it just so happened that at the beginning of the week I found myself working my way through the scene in The Wee Free Men where Tiffany finds herself in a dream not too dissimilar to Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke”.
Being a bit of a fan of the painting (and the song by Queen) I decided I’d do a bit of research to get a better feel for it, and thanks to the nice, relatively hi-res, image on Wikipedia, I printed myself off a few copies, sticking them up next to my desks at work and at home.
This morning, my good friend and work colleague, Adrian Phipps, and I were making a fresh cup of tea and chatting about the painting. Being the knowledgable chap he is (part of his degree was in Art History) we discussed the curious nature of the painting, the precision with which Dadd has placed everything and the strange deformities of some of the Fairy’s depicted in the scene.
Two in particular jumped out at him. If you take a look at the painting you’ll see the Fairy Feller, his axe held aloft waiting for the sign from the Patriarch, the grey haired man watching him with the huge hat. Just below the Patriarch are two fairies with very squashed heads. ‘Hmm’, says Adrian, ‘those heads look like eyes. And the folds of that fairy’s cloak looks like a nose and the Fellers hat looks like a mouth’.
I looked closely and pointed out that the mound upon which Oberon and Titania stand (just above the Patriarch), looks like the curve of the top of a head, and the coat of the fairy to the left of the pinky-red cloaked fairy looks like an ear.
Click for bigger picture and compare it with the full size original at Wikipedia.
As soon as we’d seen it, it seemed obvious that Dadd must have intended the face to be there, perhaps just for fun, but it felt too prominent to be a coincidence. All I could see when I looked at the picture was the face and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. We found some other possible faces elsewhere in the painting, but none were as clearly defined as this one.
So this evening, I threw the image into Photoshop and messed around with the levels a little. A few things started to bug me:
- Firstly, the pinky-red cloak of the (female?) squashed head fairy, directly below the Patriarchs beard, lacks detail (which doesn’t match the clothes of the rest of the Fairies).
- Secondly, if her head is meant to be an eye, it doesn’t quite tie up with the eye/head of her partner.
- Thirdly, what’s with her partner’s foot? He’s crossing his legs at a very awkward angle.
- Fourthly, the hidden face is almost at the centre of the painting but not quite, it felt a little too far to the right and off balance.
Then I noticed the gold curve that stretches round the right hand side of the Patriarch’s hat.
And I saw it.
The profile of an Ape!
What’s more it’s the profile of an Ape overlaid over the profile of a man’s face, much like Apple Finder Icon.
Suddenly, it all made sense.
- The cloak is the smooth pink part of the Apes face.
- The Eyes don’t match as the Ape’s eye is looking to the right, and the man’s eye is looking forward.
- The awkwardly placed foot of the partner makes up the Ape’s nose.
- When you put the outline of the Ape and the Man together it’s right, slap bang in the middle of the picture, thusly:
Whoah, thinks I. What’s that about? Ape and Man? Evolution?
Now there’s been a lot in the papers and on the radio recently about Charles Darwin, so I knew that he would have been a contemporary of Richard Dadd. I did a bit of digging on t’interweb and found quite a few similarities between the two men.
- They both travelled extensively in their early careers.
- They both apparently suffered from Bi-polar disorder.
- Both had strong links with Kent.
- (You might even argue that they were both murderers, one of his father, the other of religion)
- Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke between 1855 and 1864, Darwin published Origin of the Species on the 22 November 1859.
So would Dadd, locked away in Bethlem in Beckenham, Kent, have known of Darwin’s ideas, perhaps even known Darwin, who after all lived a mere seven miles away in Downe?
Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for one George Henry Hayden, the head steward at Bethlem Royal Hospital at the time.
A quick Google search revealed records of correspondence between George Henry Hayden and Charles Darwin at darwin-online.org.uk. I have no idea what was in those letters, but it’s not the greatest leap of logic to think that Hayden knew Darwin, possibly treated him, and spoke to Dadd about Darwin and his theories. As a gift, Dadd hid the image of the man and the ape in the painting for Hayden. Perhaps the hidden man is Hayden? Who knows? Pure speculation.
But great fun.
I’m with Neil Gaiman, who suggests that the ‘Pedagogue’ - the little bald, bearded chappy (or Sneebs as Terry Pratchett calls him), is in fact an old version of Dadd himself. I like the way he’s sat right on the shoulder of both the Ape and the Man.
I feel like one of those diabolicals from Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, which, incidentally, will be my next just-for-fun adaptation.
What do you think?
, which, quite frankly, if you want to make films and haven’t read can only mean that you’re a complete dimwit hell bent on financial ruin**. The book is an absolute goldmine of useful info. Buy it! Read it! Now!
, Michael Ondaatje’s superb book where he discusses the art of editing with Walter Murch. Walter describes how he likes to take screenshots of takes and line them up to see how they cut together. 
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