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 preparing to anoint her eyelids.  Fairy painting was a popular Victorian genre.  Dadd's tutor at the Royal Academy also was well known for his fairy paintings.  Victorians generally were sceptical and rational and new theories such as Darwin's theory of evolution and Freud's discovery of the unconscious had begun to make a profound impact.  However, religion and superstition were still powerful, collective forces.

Henry Hering, Portrait of Richard Dadd, c. 1857. Photographic print, 20 x 15.5 cm. Courtesy of Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Alex Fox (Roy Fox Fine Art Photography)

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 painted their portraits and they began to acquire and collect his works.  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.

Richard Dadd, Titania Sleeping, 1841. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 77.5 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Department of Paintings. © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

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).

Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64. Oil on canvas, 54 x 39.4 cm. Tate: Presented 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 1963. Photo: Tate

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. 

Richard Dadd, Portrait of a Young Man, 1853. Oil on canvas, 60.6 x 50 cm. Tate: Bequeathed by Ian L. Phillips 1984, accessioned 1992. Photo: Tate

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).  In Dadd's day the terms 'psychosis' and 'schizophrenia' were not used, in fact Dadd was diagnosed as suffering with 'homicidal mania' which is more a description of his behaviour than a medical category.  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.

Richard Dadd, Caravanserai at Mylasa, 1845. Oil on panel, 21.3 x 30.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Richard Dadd, Contradiction. Oberon and Titania, 1854-58. Oil on canvas, 61 x 75.5 cm. Private Collection. Photo © David Parmiter

This exhibition offers a complete view of Dadd's work and seeks to put his sensational biography and personal tragedy in perspective.  Dadd began his career at the centre of the art establishment, a very successful student at the Royal Academy, so he was hardly an outsider.  He came to acquire that status as his work came to be (unfairly) ignored, misjudged and marginalised.  Today his work is back at the establishment where he began and audiences can once again marvel at his astonishing technique and incredible visions.

Paul Murphy, the Royal Academy, August 2026