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A friend of the young Richard Dadd when he was one of the stars of the Royal Academy of Arts referred to his “rich voice as full of music as a joy-bell” and his “sportive humour, exciting innocent mirth”.
A few years later, Dadd had stabbed his father to death during a psychotic episode. Dadd avoided hanging but spent the rest of his life locked away – first in the Bethlem Royal Hospital and then in Broadmoor.
Speaking to one of the journalists who visited him during the decades of incarceration, Dadd wistfully remarked on how he had once aspired to success.
“Some painters – the few perhaps – achieve renown and substantial rewards, others lag behind,” he said.
We’ll never know what he might have been. Poignantly, the man who was a member of a group named “The Clique” when he was still full of youthful promise was suddenly denied the stimulation of working with other artists and forced to rely on memory, imagination and whatever inspiration his immediate surroundings could provide.
Still, he never stopped painting and was encouraged to do so by hospital staff.
He also never entirely lost his delusions and continues to fascinate as an artist and a case study. If the Royal Academy exhibition, which ended on October 25, has drawn you in, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind is the permanent home for much of his work and his medical records.
The museum is in Beckenham in Kent, but the Bethlem hospital, popularly known as Bedlam, was in Southwark, London, when Dadd spent nine years working on the most famous of the paintings he created there.
“The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke” portrays the cleaving of a chestnut to create the carriage for Shakespeare’s Queen Mab. Its highly textured mass of intricate detail includes what critics have interpreted as a reference to the fatal blow Dadd dealt to his chemist father. In the top right-hand corner of the painting, a young boy with blood pouring through his fingers reaches across to a figure with a pestle and mortar.
Loaned for the purposes of this exhibition, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke” usually hangs in the Tate Britain after the war poet Siegfried Sassoon presented it to the gallery in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, great nephew of the artist.
Dadd’s fairy paintings based on Shakespeare were how he first gained major recognition.
“Titania Sleeping”, painted in 1941, is on the face of it a scene of innocence and bliss, but closer inspection is unsettling: the eyes of the tiny goblin musicians entwined into a living arbour that arches over the queen and her attendants sparkle with dew and menace.
“Puck”, also from 1841, is at least as much a devil as a cherub.
It is tempting to read Dadd’s depictions of the parallel world of sprites and goblins as an expression of the duality in his own mind, which became apparent after he made a Mediterranean tour with lawyer and politician Sir Thomas Phillips, who extended the invitation after being captivated by Dadd’s work.
The tour spanned Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt and Greece. Dadd filled notebooks with sketches and his mind with images and memories. It also marked the beginning of his mental torment.
In a letter of 1842, Dadd described his feeling of being overwhelmed by all he had seen.
By the time he returned home, he was experiencing paranoid delusions and in 1843, he stabbed his father, believing he was the devil.
Once he had been arrested and confined, many of Dadd’s paintings revisited his travels. His “View of Rhodes” is an atmospheric water colour, notable for the tiny figure precisely placed at the juncture of land and sea, perhaps looking out, perhaps about to fall.
The painting that has become known as “The Flight out of Egypt” is as hectic, unruly and colourful as the “View of Rhodes” is muted and peaceful. Instead of one tiny figure, it depicts people of multiple nationalities.
Dadd’s time in confinement coincided with reforms that led to less use of restraints, such as manacles. Dr William Charles Hood, one of the physicians at Bethlem was among those who favoured more humane treatment and who encouraged Dadd to paint.
Art critics have speculated that long before art therapy became fashionable, Hood suggested Dadd’s series of “Sketches to Illustrate the Passions”.
Compared with the intricacy of Dadd’s fairy scenes, they are straightforward explorations of aspects of human nature, ranging from ambition to “Agony – Raving Madness”.
Despite the exhibition’s title, we are in effect being taken back to Bedlam, but we have also explored a wide artistic world.
Richard Dadd
Royal Academy, London
Beyond Bedlam
A friend of the young Richard Dadd when he was one of the stars of the Royal Academy of Arts referred to his “rich voice as full of music as a joy-bell” and his “sportive humour, exciting innocent mirth”.
A few years later, Dadd had stabbed his father to death during a psychotic episode. Dadd avoided hanging but spent the rest of his life locked away – first in the Bethlem Royal Hospital and then in Broadmoor.
Speaking to one of the journalists who visited him during the decades of incarceration, Dadd wistfully remarked on how he had once aspired to success.
“Some painters – the few perhaps – achieve renown and substantial rewards, others lag behind,” he said.
We’ll never know what he might have been. Poignantly, the man who was a member of a group named “The Clique” when he was still full of youthful promise was suddenly denied the stimulation of working with other artists and forced to rely on memory, imagination and whatever inspiration his immediate surroundings could provide.
Still, he never stopped painting and was encouraged to do so by hospital staff.
He also never entirely lost his delusions and continues to fascinate as an artist and a case study. If the Royal Academy exhibition, which ended on October 25, has drawn you in, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind is the permanent home for much of his work and his medical records.
The museum is in Beckenham in Kent, but the Bethlem hospital, popularly known as Bedlam, was in Southwark, London, when Dadd spent nine years working on the most famous of the paintings he created there.
“The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke” portrays the cleaving of a chestnut to create the carriage for Shakespeare’s Queen Mab. Its highly textured mass of intricate detail includes what critics have interpreted as a reference to the fatal blow Dadd dealt to his chemist father. In the top right-hand corner of the painting, a young boy with blood pouring through his fingers reaches across to a figure with a pestle and mortar.
Loaned for the purposes of this exhibition, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke” usually hangs in the Tate Britain after the war poet Siegfried Sassoon presented it to the gallery in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, great nephew of the artist.
Dadd’s fairy paintings based on Shakespeare were how he first gained major recognition.
“Titania Sleeping”, painted in 1941, is on the face of it a scene of innocence and bliss, but closer inspection is unsettling: the eyes of the tiny goblin musicians entwined into a living arbour that arches over the queen and her attendants sparkle with dew and menace.
“Puck”, also from 1841, is at least as much a devil as a cherub.
It is tempting to read Dadd’s depictions of the parallel world of sprites and goblins as an expression of the duality in his own mind, which became apparent after he made a Mediterranean tour with lawyer and politician Sir Thomas Phillips, who extended the invitation after being captivated by Dadd’s work.
The tour spanned Turkey, Cyprus, Egypt and Greece. Dadd filled notebooks with sketches and his mind with images and memories. It also marked the beginning of his mental torment.
In a letter of 1842, Dadd described his feeling of being overwhelmed by all he had seen.
By the time he returned home, he was experiencing paranoid delusions and in 1843, he stabbed his father, believing he was the devil.
Once he had been arrested and confined, many of Dadd’s paintings revisited his travels. His “View of Rhodes” is an atmospheric water colour, notable for the tiny figure precisely placed at the juncture of land and sea, perhaps looking out, perhaps about to fall.
The painting that has become known as “The Flight out of Egypt” is as hectic, unruly and colourful as the “View of Rhodes” is muted and peaceful. Instead of one tiny figure, it depicts people of multiple nationalities.
Dadd’s time in confinement coincided with reforms that led to less use of restraints, such as manacles. Dr William Charles Hood, one of the physicians at Bethlem was among those who favoured more humane treatment and who encouraged Dadd to paint.
Art critics have speculated that long before art therapy became fashionable, Hood suggested Dadd’s series of “Sketches to Illustrate the Passions”.
Compared with the intricacy of Dadd’s fairy scenes, they are straightforward explorations of aspects of human nature, ranging from ambition to “Agony – Raving Madness”.
Despite the exhibition’s title, we are in effect being taken back to Bedlam, but we have also explored a wide artistic world.
Barbara Lewis © 2026.
By Barbara Lewis • added recently on London Grip, art, exhibitions, painting • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, exhibitions, painting