Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd painted his strangest and most famous picture, 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke', while locked in a criminal asylum for killing his own father. He worked at it from 1855 to about 1864 and still left it unfinished, a dense little panel barely the size of a sheet of paper, crammed with fairies frozen around a woodcutter about to split a hazelnut.

Dadd had been a rising young English painter in the 1840s. On a long tour through Greece, Egypt and the Holy Land his mind gave way, and he came home convinced he was under the command of the Egyptian god Osiris and had to destroy people he believed possessed. In 1843 he stabbed his father to death. He was found insane rather than tried, one of the early cases handled under the new M'Naghten rules on criminal insanity, and was sent to Bethlem hospital in London, the place old London called Bedlam.

He would spend the rest of his life confined, more than 40 years, first at Bethlem and then at the newly built Broadmoor asylum, allowed all the while to keep painting. The Fairy Feller was made for George Henry Haydon, a steward at Bethlem, and Dadd later wrote a long poem trying to name every tiny figure he had packed into it.