RICHARD DADD: BEYOND BEDLAM at the ROYAL ACADEMY on the 11th of August 2026

 

RICHARD DADD: BEYOND BEDLAM at the ROYAL ACADEMY on the 11^th of August 2026

 

Richard Dadd was born in Chatham Kent in 1817 and died in 1886.  Dadd learnt to draw and paint at the Royal Academy, and while there he was a member of a small art group known as The Clique.  The exhibition traces Dadd’s career in a linear fashion from his art apprenticeship to his early fairy paintings.  These are derived from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his work Titania Sleeping (1841, oil on canvas) was an early masterpiece that made him famous.  It depicts Titania sleeping surrounded by goblins, Oberon lurks in the shadows.

In July 1842 Dadd was hired by Sir Thomas Philpott to accompany his exhibition to the Levant, the eastern part of the Mediterranean, as an official artist.  During a journey by boat up the Nile, Dadd suffered a personality change and came to believe that he was under the influence of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris.  When he returned to England in 1843, he suffered a further nervous breakdown and was taken by his family to rest in the countryside.  He subsequently killed his father Robert with a knife and then fled by train to France but was arrested after attempting to kill a fellow passenger with a razor.  He was then committed to the criminal department of the Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital (aka Bedlam).  Dadd continued to paint when his doctors, William Orange, William Wood, Sir William Charles Wood and Alexander Morrison came to understand the therapeutic benefits of art and allowed him to use artist’s materials.  He was also to paint their portraits.  He was later moved to Broadmoor Hospital, a high security psychiatric hospital near Reading, Berkshire.  It was here that Dadd’s subject matter changed and began to reflect the fields and open countryside near the hospital.  His removal underlines the Victorian concern to push the most seriously disturbed away from urban centres like London.  Madness and the irrational were therefore equated with nature rather than society and culture.

Dadd’s work does not signify total derangement.  In fact, it’s clear that he must have been capable of long periods of intensely focussed and dedicated work.  His distinctive miniaturist style yolks together various schools of art including his academic style learnt during his time at the Royal Academy, Rococo fantasy, hyper-realism to the extent that his most complex works create a vertiginous effect on the viewer.  Dadd attempts to pack everything he possibly can into his paintings which are crowded with characters and incidents.  This makes his most important works like The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke (1854-1864) hard to approach, comprehend and assess.  They are undeniably mystic, mysterious, eclectic and strange (but so are the works of Bosch and Dali which aren’t surrounded by the tragic overtones of Dadd’s work).

Obviously, the stress of foreign travel and the exotic, foreign and non-European peoples he encountered, collapsed the certainties of his Victorian upbringing where family and patriarchy were unquestionable truths.  To rebel against these, as Dadd presumably did, was to commit professional and personal suicide.  For almost 100 years after his death, Dadd’s paintings were forgotten but began to be rediscovered in the 1960s and 70s, presumably by a counterculture eager to rehabilitate outsider artists like Dadd.  This was the time of R.D.Laing’s investigation of schizophrenia The Divided Self and new critiques and interpretations of Freud (who famously disdained to treat psychosis, regarding it as intractable).  According to Freud psychosis was untreatable and the imaginative products of sufferers were of negligible importance.  Dadd’s work seems to pose an objection to this.  In the 1970s popular artists like Freddy Mercury and Angela Carter began to integrate their ideas about Dadd’s work into their creative output. 

The exhibition tends to play down the notorious, tragic and sensationalist aspects of Dadd’s life.  There is only a brief reference to his psychotic illness and subsequent committal.  It’s true that Dadd escaped the gallows with his pleas of diminished responsibility (probably a plea made on his behalf by his doctors and lawyer).  He was never released from Broadmoor, and any form of rehabilitation was completely out of the question.  Today his rehabilitation could only be partial since public incomprehension and ignorance would not allow it.  Furthermore, it seems that Dadd’s entire family was dysfunctional because two of his siblings also suffered from schizophrenia.  The exhibition incorporates Dadd’s self-portrait, and paintings of his siblings and father.  The completion of these watercolours seems to indicate a strong emotional bond.