A Twilight Zone Moment

Another one of those weird coincidences happened again this week. The picture at left, I learned this week, is of an art museum in London called the Tate Gallery.  It was founded in 1897 and houses the UK's national collection of British art. In the Tate Gallery (or Tate Britain as it is called today) hangs a rather curious painting called the Fairy Fellers Master - Stroke. It is shown below. It was commissioned by the Head Steward of Bethlem Hospital in 1855. The hospital I was already familiar with. It is the origin of the term bedlam. The Bethlem Hospital was in the forefront of cruel and unusual treatment of mental patients and the name has come to have a very bad connotation. The painter was Richard Dadd, who was incarcerated in the hospital for what would now be called schizophrenia. In 1842 while on a boat trip down the Nile River, he had a personality change and claimed that he had been taken over by the Egyptian god Osiris. He was committed to Bethlem Hospital in 1843 after killing his father (who he thought had been possessed by the devil) and remained in mental hospitals until he died in 1886. I ran across the first reference to the painting while reading a pair of fantasy novels by Mike Shevdon called Sixty - One Nails and  The Road to Bedlam. They are very reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which is one of my favorite books.  A man dies in a subway of a heart attack, but is brought back to life by a woman who introduces him to the Fey're world. That world exists alongside our own, but normal people tend to block out things they see that they don't understand.

 

The painting is described in the novel as Dadd's attempt to portray this Fey're world on canvas. The painting took Dadd nine years to create, and according to Wikipedia, the detail is so microscopic and the paint so layered that the painting is nearly 3-D.

So, the day after I finish these two books, I begin re-reading The Wee Free Men in the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett. If you have not read a book by Terry Pratchett, you have missed out on a wonderful series of books set in a mythical place called Discworld.    There is no series that is funnier or that captures the absurdities of modern life better.  The four volume Tiffany Aching series is about a young witch who is learning the ropes in a very backwater part of Discworld and meets up with all kinds of interesting people and situations.  And, although I have no recollection from reading this book the first time in 2005, the Ferry Fellers Master - Stroke painting shows up as an important part of the story. When I looked the painting up on Wikipedia, I also found that Freddie Mercury was a big fan of the painting and a song with that title shows up on Queen's second album. I can't believe that I didn't hear that song in the car this week just to complete the trifecta of weirdness. Followed by the theme song from X-Files to cap it off.  The Truth is Out There, probably written in invisible ink on the back of the Fairy Fellers Master - Stroke.