Many old paintings look weird because we lost the key their first viewers held.
Saint Lucy often holds her own eyes on a plate. Churchgoers knew her eyes were torn out before her execution, so the plate named her at a glance.
Other oddities have kept their secret. Around 1300, knights fighting snails filled the margins of manuscripts, and scholars still argue about why.
The twelve below mix both kinds.
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How These Were Chosen
Only paintings, and only oddities you can point to in the image, never a legend like a curse. Each one is either a lost code or an open puzzle. The entries are numbered by date, with 1 the oldest.
12. Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (1855 to 1864)
Dozens of tiny figures hold still around a fairy woodcutter, who lifts his axe above a hazelnut. Richard Dadd worked on this canvas from 1855 to 1864. He painted it inside Bethlem Hospital, the London asylum where he was being held.
In 1843, Dadd had stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise. He was committed to the criminal wing of Bethlem the following year.
The picture was painted for George Henry Haydon, the steward of Bethlem. Haydon apparently suggested some "verse about the fairies" as a starting point for the work. Before his illness, Dadd had made his name with fairy scenes taken from Shakespeare.
The hazelnut comes from Romeo and Juliet. In the play, Romeo's friend Mercutio describes Queen Mab, the fairy who brings dreams to sleepers.
She is "no bigger than an agate stone," and "Her chariot is an empty hazelnut." The historian Nicholas Tromans thinks this was the verse Haydon had in mind.
Dadd's woodcutter is about to split a new coach for her. Mab herself waits nearby, built from dots of paint so small that she almost vanishes.
Only two other figures come from Shakespeare. Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen of A Midsummer Night's Dream, appear in the upper half.
Along the top, Dadd lined up the characters of a counting rhyme: soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, plowboy, apothecary and thief. The rest he invented.
A group of men watches the woodcutter intently. A bearded patriarch wears a crown with a long brim, where a troupe of dancers performs along the edge.
Those dancers are where the search for a story ends. No plot needs them, yet Dadd fit a whole company onto one hat brim.
On the back of the canvas, Dadd wrote that the work had taken nine years. He hedged the figure with a single word, "quasi." In 1864 he was moved to Broadmoor, a new asylum in Berkshire.
When he left Bethlem, parts of the foreground had never got past the sketch. At Broadmoor in 1865, he explained the picture in a long poem that names each figure.
The poem admits that he began with no plan at all, because "Fancy was not to be evoked." The design, he says, grew "Without intent" out of "vacant entities of chance."
At a Glance
Artist: Richard Dadd (1817 to 1886)
Painted: 1855 to 1864
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 54 × 39.4 cm (21.3 × 15.5 in)
Where to see it: Tate Britain, London
About This Painting
Did Queen write a song about The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke?
Yes, Queen did. In 1974, Freddie Mercury took words from Dadd's poem about the picture for the lyrics of a song with the same title. It appeared on Queen II, the band's second album.
Is there a poem about The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke?
Yes, Richard Dadd wrote one himself, in 1865. He called it "Elimination of a Picture & its Subject." It was first published in 2020, by Hiding Press.
How did Richard Dadd die?
Richard Dadd died of consumption, the old name for tuberculosis, at Broadmoor on January 8, 1886. He had spent more than forty years in asylums.
11. William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea (about 1819 to 1820)
Between two parted curtains, a muscular creature steps forward with a cup in its hand. Its tongue flicks out toward the cup.
Behind it, a shooting star falls through the night sky. William Blake painted this ghost of a flea around 1819 to 1820, from a vision he had first drawn in pencil.