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A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (1907)

Wednesday 4 April 2012 at 15:51


A Theory of Pure Design – Harmony, Balance, Rhythm; 1907; Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

A book detailing the science behind harmony, balance, and rhythm in art. The author, Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), was an American painter, art collector, and professor of art at Harvard University. From the preface:

The terms and principles of Art have, as a rule, been understood by the artist in the form of technical processes and visual images, not in words. It is in words that they will become generally understood. It is in words that I propose to explain them in this book. I want to bring to definition what, until now, has not been clearly defined or exactly measured. In a sense this book is a contribution to Science rather than to Art. It is a contribution to Science made by a painter, who has used his Art in order to understand his Art, not to produce Works of Art. In a passage of Plato (Philebus, ^f 55) Socrates says: “If arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken out of any art, that which remains will not be much.”


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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/04/04/a-theory-of-pure-design-harmony-balance-rhythm-1907/


Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914)

Tuesday 3 April 2012 at 10:48



This Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice, released on 7 February 1914, was only Charlie Chaplin’s second ever appearance on film and the screen debut of his famous Tramp character. Although it was the first film released involving the Tramp, Chaplin had actually devised the outfit for the film Mabel’s Strange Predicament produced a few days earlier but released a couple days after Kid Auto Races at Venice, on 9 February 1914. Mack Sennett had requested that Chaplin “get into a comedy make-up”. As Chaplin recalled in his autobiography:

I had no idea what makeup to put on. I did not like my get-up as the press reporter [in Making a Living]. However on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering Sennett had expected me to be a much older man, I added a small moustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born.

In The Kid Auto Races at Venice Chaplin takes the Tramp to the races where he annoys a director, who is trying to film there, by continuously trying to sneak into shot.

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Note this film is in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.










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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/04/03/kid-auto-races-at-venice-1914/


Plates from Spiegel’s De formato foetu liber singularis (1626)

Monday 2 April 2012 at 11:50

Giulio Cesare Casseri, also known as Casserio, was born in about 1552 in Piacenza. His father died when he was young leaving his family poor, so when he attended medical school at the University of Padua he did so as the servant of another student. Later he was a servant to the noted Fabricius ab Aquapendente (ca. 1533-1619), whose chair in surgery and anatomy Casseri later filled. He was especially known during his lifetime for his research into the anatomy of the speech and auditory organs. In about 1600, he began work on an anatomical atlas covering the entire human body, which he still had not completed at the time of his death in 1616. In fact, it has been conjectured that Fabricius stopped its publication in 1616 because of a rivalry between the two.

Adriaan van de Spiegel, sometimes known as Spigelius, was born in Brussels in 1578. After studying medicine and philosophy in Louvain, he went to the University of Padua to study medicine under Casseri and Fabricius. Becoming an expert in anatomy, surgery, and botany, Spiegel made a name for himself practicing in Germany, Hungary, and Moravia. In 1616, he was appointed to the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua after Casseri’s death, and he died in that city on April 7, 1625.

At the time of Adriaan van de Spiegel’s death, his son in law, another physician named Liberale Crema (fl. 1626) edited Spiegel’s unillustrated anatomical text, De formato foetu liber singularis. To accompany it, he obtained nine copperplate engravings which Casseri had created either for a work on general anatomy or one specifically on fetal development. The plates are the work of Titian’s student Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), and engraver, Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560); the same artist and engraver who created Casseri’s plates for his anatomical magnum opus which were published with Spiegel’s text, De humani corporis fabrica libri decem (Venice, 1627).

(Text and images are from the National Library of Medicine and their excellent Historical Anatomies on the Web. Clicking on the images below will take you to the higher resolution version housed by the NLM.)




























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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/04/02/plates-from-spiegels-de-formato-foetu-liber-singularis-1626/


Remembering Scott

Thursday 29 March 2012 at 14:08

A century on from his dramatic death on the way back from the South Pole, the memory of the explorer Captain Scott and his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition is stronger than ever. Max Jones explores the role that the iconic visual record has played in keeping the legend alive.

The photographer Herbert Ponting giving a lecture on his travels in Japan to the Terra Nova team in the hut at Cape Evans.

Why are some historical figures remembered, while others are forgotten?

Major-General Henry Havelock was the toast of the nation in 1857. One of the British heroes of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, Havelock died after the relief of the city of Lucknow. Such was the fame of the devout Christian soldier, parliament approved the erection of his statue in Trafalgar Square, which still stands today. A decade ago, however, Mayor Ken Livingstone complained that most Londoners had no idea who Havelock was.

The memory of Captain Scott, who died in Antarctica one hundred years ago, has fared much better than Havelock’s. The centenary of Scott’s last expedition has generated a wave of books, events, radio broadcasts and television documentaries over the last two years, including BBC 2’s The Secrets of Scott’s Hut fronted by modern celebrity-explorer Ben Fogle, a major new exhibition at the Natural History Museum, and a national memorial service at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Scott’s exploits in the uninhabited continent of Antarctica are free of the troubling associations which surround many other imperial heroes. Should the statue of a man known primarily for subjugating India still stand in the centre of a city where over one in ten of the inhabitants have roots in South Asia? As with so many aspects of our imperial past, Britons have found it easier to ignore and forget rather than confront such difficult questions.

In part, of course, Scott is remembered today because his last expedition is such a great story: the drama of the race with Norwegian Roald Amundsen; the heart-breaking arrival at the South Pole a month too late; the agonising suspense of the return march; the tragic end only 11 miles from a supply depot which would have saved them. Yet a great story alone offers no guarantee of remembrance. Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition and his incredible boat journey to South Georgia were surprisingly neglected in Britain until the end of the 1990s.

Captain Scott writing in his journal.

Interior of the hut at Cape Evans with Cherry Garrard, Bowers, Oates, Meares and Atkinson.

Elsewhere1, I have emphasised the significance of Scott’s own words to his continued remembrance. The ‘Message to the Public’ Scott wrote at the back of his journal remains one of the ultimate expressions of bravery in the face of death. Scott’s journals are on permanent display as one of the ‘Treasures of the British Library’. The centenary celebrations would have been far less extensive if a search party had not found the journals in November 1912.

But visual iconography has also proved essential to sustaining Scott’s story. His decision-making has been widely criticised, most savagely in Roland Huntford’s classic debunking biography Scott and Amundsen (London, 1979). Scott deserves great credit, though, for his appointment of Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s self-styled ‘camera artist’. Ponting’s early life remains obscure, but we know he abandoned his family to pursue a full-time career in photography. He later observed that he wouldn’t even recognise his own son if he walked past him on the street.

Ponting exposed around 25,000 feet of film and 2,000 photographic negatives in the Antarctic. Rarely, if ever, has an expedition been documented so thoroughly and so beautifully. Publishers and film-makers today can be confident of the availability of rich visual resources for any new Scott project, with striking photographs of the central characters, wild life and Antarctic environment. Ponting frequently juxtaposed awe-inspiring natural features with tiny human figures, presenting the Antarctic as a medieval fortress besieged by brave polar knights.

The castle berg in summer

Photograph taken in January 1911 of Taylor and Wright at the entrance of an ice grotto near Cape Evans. The ship Terra Nova is anchored in the background.

In 1914, Ponting mounted a hugely successful series of illustrated lectures about the expedition at the Philharmonic Hall, performing in front of 100,000 people in only two months. The lectures proved so successful, King George V invited him to give a special performance at Buckingham Palace. Ponting had the misfortune, however, of purchasing the complete rights to the expedition’s film record from the Gaumont Company just before the outbreak of the First World War. Ponting would spend much of the next two decades attempting to exploit his Antarctic work, but never matched the success of the Philharmonic Hall lectures.

Although his work continues to shape visual representations of Antarctica, Ponting did not take the most famous photograph of Scott’s last expedition. The explorers themselves exposed ten plates at the South Pole. In one they appear to slouch around Amundsen’s tent like rock stars on an album cover. Henry Bowers pulled the cord which took the most iconic image of the Antarctic disaster. This photograph remains the most frequently reproduced: five grim faces marked by hardships endured and the certain knowledge of hardships to come, the forlorn union jack a reminder of their defeat. The survival of this remarkable photograph helps explain the enduring appeal of Scott’s story. In 2000 Hello Magazine published two special editions celebrating ‘The 20th Century in Pictures’, ‘An Heirloom to Treasure’. Scott, Bowers, Evans, Oates and Wilson stared out from the front cover.

Photograph taken by Lieut. Bowers on 17 January 1912, a day after they reached the SOuth Pole to discover that Amundsen had beat them to it. The two sitting are Evans and Oates, with Bowers, Scott and Wilson standing behind them.

Scott and his men at Amundsen's base, Polheim. Left to right: Scott, Bowers, Wilson, and P. O. Evans.

The grave of Scott, Bowers and Wilson, erected at their final camp where their bodies were found.



Dr Max Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford UP, 2003) and the editor of Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition (Oxford World’s Classics) (Oxford UP, 2005). Max has been invited to lecture on Scott to audiences in Los Angeles, Milan and Tasmania. He is currently working on a new book on the rise and fall of national heroes over the last 250 years.


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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/29/remembering-scott/


An Alphabet of History (1905)

Tuesday 27 March 2012 at 18:23


An Alphabet of History, the words by Wilbur D. Nesbit, the pictures by Ellsworth Young; 1905; Paul Elder and Company Publishers, San Francisco.

“Who frets about the mystery / Enshrouding all of history / On reading this will, maybe, see / We’ve made it plain as ABC.” From Alexander The Great, “a victim of fate”, to Zenobia, “the empress of Palmyra” – an illustrated ABC set to verse of history’s big players (at least as envisaged in 1905).

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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/27/an-alphabet-of-history-1905/


Alice in Wonderland (1915)

Thursday 22 March 2012 at 15:43



1915 silent film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, directed and written by W.W. Young and starring Viola Savoy as Alice. This is a tinted and shorter cut of the film. There is an untinted longer version (though lower quality) here. Included above are two versions: the film without sound or the film with a nice soundtrack added by the original Internet Archive uploader (though be aware that the copyright info on the early vinyl recording used is unknown).

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Note this film is in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.




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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/22/alice-in-wonderland-1915/


Prelinger Archive 35mm Stock Footage

Wednesday 21 March 2012 at 15:48



A fantastic new collection titled “35mm Stock Footage” has recently been uploaded by the Prelinger Archive to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Digitized into HD from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used. Much of the footage is “process plates” — film shot for the rear-projection screens you see out of car, taxi and train windows in old movies. Here we have included a few highlights from the bunch – above: miniature shots of a flooding river carrying away a model house and a small plane crashing in the jungle – below: various war related footage including beautiful shots of a convoy of tanks crossing a river at night under fire, and beneath that aerial footage of military planes in flight (with some athletes running round a track sneaking in at the end).





We also recommend checking out the outtakes from these early shorts.

Note these film are in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.




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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/21/prelinger-archive-35mm-stock-footage/


Illuminated pages from 15th century Breviaries

Monday 19 March 2012 at 12:28

A breviary (from Latin brevis, ‘short’ or ‘concise’) is a liturgical book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church containing the public or canonical prayers, hymns, the Psalms, readings, and notations for everyday use, especially by bishops, priests, and deacons in the Divine Office (i.e., at the canonical hours or Liturgy of the Hours, the Christians’ daily prayer). Below is a selection of illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century.

For more info and higher res versions please see Wikimedia Commons






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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/19/illuminated-pages-from-15th-century-breviaries/


Robert Browning attempting to recite ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ (1889)

Friday 16 March 2012 at 11:13



The voice of great English poet, Robert Browning (1812 – 1889) recorded while at a dinner party given by Browning’s friend the artist Rudolf Lehmann, on April 7th, 1889. The sales manager of Edison Talking machine, Colonel Gouraud, had brought with him a phonograph to show the guests and to record their voices. Browning, though reluctant at first, eventually gives in and begins to recite his poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. Unfortunately, he “cannot remember me own verses” and gives up going on to expressing how he certainly won’t forget though this “wonderful invention”. He was to die just under 8 months later. When the recording was played in 1890 on the anniversary of his death, at a gathering of his admirers, it was said to be the first time anyone’s voice “had been heard from beyond the grave.”

I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
‘Speed’ echoed the wall to us galloping through…
‘Speed’ echoed the…
Then the gate shut behind us, the lights sank to rest…


I’m terribly sorry but I can’t remember me own verses,
but one thing that I shall remember all me life is the astonishing [inaudible] by your wonderful invention.

Robert Browning!

[other voices]
Bravo, bravo, bravo.
Hip, hip, hooray.
Hip, hip, hooray.
Hip, hip, hooray.
Bravo.


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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/16/robert-browning-attempting-to-recite-a-poem-on-the-edison-cylinder-1889/


Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke

Wednesday 14 March 2012 at 12:25

Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, takes a look at Dadd’s most famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

Detail of the main section showing the Fairy-Feller about to hew the nut - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)

Richard Dadd was a young British painter of huge promise who fell into mental illness while touring the Mediterranean in the early 1840s. He spent over forty years in lunatic asylums, dying at Broadmoor in 1886, but never gave up his calling, producing mesmerisingly detailed watercolours and oil paintings of which The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is now the most well known. The picture’s history encapsulates the peculiar rise and, if not fall then the suspension, of its maker’s reputation, and indeed begs the question of what happens to any long-dead forgotten genius after they’ve been rediscovered.

Among the symptoms of Dadd’s illness – which sounds today like a form of schizophrenia – were delusions of persecution and the receipt of messages from the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. Dadd was commanded to kill his father (or the demon who it appeared to him had taken his place) and did so with efficiency in the summer of 1843, not long after returning from his tour. After an equally well planned escape to France, the artist was eventually admitted to the Criminal Lunatic department of Bethlem Hospital in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum) and it was here that he painted the Fairy Feller. According to the inscription on the back of the canvas it took him nine years to complete, although Dadd qualifies this claim with “quasi” (“sort of”) which may mean he only worked at it on and off between 1855 and 1864.

It is an exhaustingly complex image, with a substantial cast of characters, none of whom are doing much with the exception of the “feller” himself who is about to hew a hazelnut in half in order to provide the diminutive queen of the fairies, Mab, with a new chariot. Dadd’s starting point was evidently Mercutio’s teasing speech in Romeo and Juliet in which he imagines in excruciating detail the nightly wanderings of Mab as she seeds dreams in sleepers’ heads, nocturnal visions in which suppressed ambitions and desires reveal themselves. Dadd’s inscription further informs us that the picture was painted for the Steward of Bethlem, George Henry Haydon, and in a long poem (or at least rhymed catalogue) which the artist wrote in 1865, he gives a kind of cast-list as well as offering an account of how the picture came to be painted. It was apparently Haydon who suggested some “verse about the fairies” as a “point from which to throw” – presumably the Mercutio speech which may have been intended by the Bethlem official as a means of encouraging Dadd to revisit his early life before illness had struck, when he had made his reputation as a painter of Shakespearean fairy subjects. Victorian psychiatrists were in any case fond of writing on the “cases” described by the Bard, and Charles Lamb observed how, despite the extravagant imaginative leaps of his fairy scenes, Shakespeare himself presented a kind of inverse monomania, maintaining the thread of sanity even through the most outlandish journeys of the mind.

Photograph by Henry Hering (ca. 1856) of Dadd painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania.

Having received the commission for a new fairy painting from Haydon, however, Dadd says inspiration failed to materialise. He took the idea of spiritual inspiration very literally, seeing indeed the work of spirits in all human endeavour. Individuals and entire cultures may aspire to noble achievements, but the help or hindrance of the spirit world was what counted and its genii were not inclined to submit themselves to human service for long. “What’s the use of attempting the enlightenment?” asked Dadd in some notes written in the 1850s. “What a number of times the destroying angel has triumphed over the different nations of the earth – sucking them up & knocking them down”. And equally for an artist seeking to pin down their genius and compel it to answer: “What a clever angel the genius of painting must be to escape from all these hot pursuits … but once free, not all the arts of any old fellow I suppose can lure back the pretty bird to its own disgrace and bondage.” Dadd’s theory of art was thus thoroughly pessimistic. The public were a waste of time, and “one might fancy pictures are like monks secluded from and very little noticed by the world so that after all what matters about its quality except to the few, the initiated”. This might at least allow that Haydon may have been a worthwhile patron, but as for the artist himself, “what more slavish than painting, what more hopeless?” So when seeking to make a beginning of the Fairy Feller, Dadd’s only strategy upon realising that “Fancy was not to be evoked / From her etherial realms” was to accept his passive role, to entirely empty his mind: “I thought on nought – a shift / As good perhaps as thinking hard.” Finally the method succeeded: “Indefinite, almost unseen, / Lay vacant entities of chance” and gradually the “Design and composition” evolved “Without intent”. Dadd’s description of the painting, which he styled Elimination of a Picture and its Subject, thus has a curious sense of disavowal about it, as if saying who is in it is all he can do, their significance being beyond his explanation. When Dadd comes to note the head of a man wearing a conical red cap, poking out of the landscape in the top-left of the picture, he tells us that “Of the / Chinese Small Foot Societee, He’s a small member. But / if Confucius sent him Now I can’t remember.”

“Of the / Chinese Small Foot Societee, He’s a small member. But / if Confucius sent him Now I can’t remember.” -Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)

The characters of the Fairy Feller are mainly arranged in pairs and clusters. A group of men watch the feller intently while over the lead actor’s head is the Patriarch with epic beard, along the elongated brim of whose crown cavort a troupe of dancers apparently in Spanish costume, and indeed Dadd observes that “One is / dressed like to Duvernay”, that is Pauline Duvernay, a flamenco dancer famous on the stages of 1830s London. On either side of the Patriarch are pairs of maids and gallants, all showing an exaggeratedly gendered leg. Above the Patriarch are Oberon and Titania – rival monarchs to Mab who waits for her new chariot just below them to the left. She is, as Mercutio had described her, microscopic and yet painted by Dadd with an entirely convincing series of miniaturised impressionist touches. In the upper-left of the painting strange creatures summon further witnesses to the great moment of the splitting of the nut, and then Dadd offers – in the sequence of seven figures along the top of the picture – a version of the counting rhyme whereby boys allowed fate to choose them a profession, or girls a husband: soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, ploughboy, apothecary, thief. If the Fairy Feller were a work intended for critical interpretation, which it probably was not, then we might talk of the suspended action with which the seed was to be split; the deferred moment of sex; the mutual isolation of the groups of figures suggesting the impossibility of generating a family or a community; and we might connect these themes to Dadd’s awareness of his own position as a long-stay patient in London’s high-security lunatic asylum where, “shut out from nature’s game” and “banished from nature’s book of life, because some angel in the strife had got the worser fate”, his lot was “in a paradise of fools [to] contented live.” But Dadd knew, given the workings of spirits, angels and fate, that autobiography was a vain fiction, and we should be wary of assuming that his most famous picture must somehow be his personal testament.

The crown patriarch - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)


The as of yet uncracked nut with onlookers - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)

The Fairy Feller became Dadd’s most famous work because, in 1963, it entered the Tate collection where it was soon a popular favourite. It was presented to the Gallery by the then elderly poet Siegfried Sassoon, who had himself been given it by his mother-in-law, the daughter of the vastly wealthy connoisseur Alfred Morrison whose encyclopaedic collections included several Dadds. Sassoon had a special interest in the artist, having befriended, in the trenches, three brothers who were the grandsons of Richard Dadd’s elder brother. The Fairy Feller was presented to the Tate “by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War”, a dedication which always still accompanies the painting today. Sassoon of course had yet further personal reason for taking an interest in Dadd, having himself been a patient at Craiglockhart outside Edinburgh which functioned during the War as a hospital for shell-shocked officers.

Queen of the fairies Mab with her rival monarchs Oberon and Titania - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)

The arrival of the Fairy Feller at the Tate, allowing Dadd a substantial audience for the first time since the 1840s, could not have been timed better if Sassoon had planned it (which he hadn’t: he donated the picture to a public collection having taken fright at the underhand tactics of an art dealer keen to relieve him of it). This was the period during which a new intellectual consensus was fomenting against the inherited system of nineteenth-century asylums, a consensus embracing everyone from the radical historian of psychiatry Michel Foucault to Enoch Powell, then British Secretary of State for Health. Dadd, having been more or less (if never completely) forgotten since the onset of his illness, now appeared something of a hero – a brave survivor of a vicious system which (so went the new story) locked away all those with whom the Victorians could not cope, which was to say many. Dadd appeared as the dark unconscious which underlay mainstream Victorian painting with its floppy maidens (Dadd contrarily had a penchant for sturdy women) and limp-wristed draughtsmanship (Dadd’s taught line was admired by some critics even when the world at large had forgotten him). The notorious magazine of Sixties counter-culture, Oz, ran a spread on the artist in 1971 and in 1974 Freddie Mercury used text from the Elimination poem for lyrics to a song titled the Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke which appeared on Queen’s second album.



But also in 1974 there appeared the results of a more sober, academic approach to Dadd. Patricia Allderidge took up the new post of archivist to the ancient Bethlem Hospital in the late 1960s and was able to recover much of Dadd’s forgotten biography and oeuvre, publishing her findings in the still indispensible catalogue to an exhibition devoted to the artist at the Tate. At this point, in retrospect, it seems the romanticised “anti-psychiatry” Dadd on one hand, and on the other the history of Dadd written from within the hospital itself, effectively cancelled one another out. At least, only the slightest amount of new research was published on the artist for decades after 1974. There seemed nowhere he might confidently be placed in the history of either art or psychiatry. So: how to deal with a long-dead forgotten genius once they’ve been rediscovered? If the talent in question never fitted in when alive, there’s little chance a permanent plinth in the pantheon of their field will be found for them even once posterity has handed them their posthumous prize. Once the ghost is raised from obscurity, where can we lay it down again?



Nicholas Tromans teaches at Kingston University, London. He curated the Tate Britain exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting” in 2008 and his book on Richard Dadd, The Artist and the Asylum, was published last year. He recommends to PDR readers this blog about the history of psychiatry – maintained by Bethlem Hospital.


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Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/14/richard-dadd%e2%80%99s-master-stroke/