Il colpo da maestro del taglialegna fatato

Richard Dadd painted this inside a criminal asylum. In 1843, gripped by delusion, he had killed his own father, and he spent the rest of his life confined, first at Bethlem in London, later at Broadmoor. The head steward at Bethlem, George Henry Haydon, saw that Dadd could still paint and asked him for a fairy picture of his own. Dadd worked at it for nine years, laying the paint so thick in places that petals and grass seem to stand up off the surface, every blade and costume crowded with detail. At the centre a woodcutter raises his axe to split a hazelnut for the fairies' carriage. Dadd never quite finished it to his own mind, and inscribed the back as done quasi, meaning almost, between 1855 and 1864.