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The life of Richard Dadd makes for quite a story. The painter murdered his father during a psychotic episode and spent the rest of his life in Victorian asylums, and it was in these institutions that he created some of the most haunting paintings in the history of British art. So what about his work, on show this summer at the Royal Academy, where he began his career as a brilliantly talented student?
After his death in 1886, Dadd was almost totally forgotten until a resurgence of interest in the 1960s and 1970s, when the dreamlike qualities of his “fairy” imagery struck a chord in the hippy era. Since then, Dadd has slipped back into semi-obscurity, not quite forgotten, but hardly a central figure in our perception of Victorian culture, let alone the broader sweep of British art. In a society with a greater awareness of mental health, it feels a good moment to look again at one of the most technically skilful but profoundly challenged of all British artists.
The title of this first major Dadd exhibition in 50 years, “Beyond Bedlam” suggests it will be looking outside the hospital confines where he spent 43 years, to less familiar works: portraits, travel paintings and landscapes, as well as the magical “outsider art” for which he is best known.
A small group of student paintings is exactly what you’d expect of an early 19th-century “model student” at the Royal Academy: a slightly wishy-washy portrait of a friend in historical garb, a scene with Hamlet glimpsing his father’s ghost, which the wall texts describe as leaning towards “the uncanny and the macabre”, but feels like very standard student fare of the time.
Yet Dadd’s first “fairy” paintings, visionary imaginings of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, made his reputation when he was just 24. While initially influenced by Irish painter Daniel Maclise, they soon brought something genuinely new to the table. In Titania Sleeping (1841), the Queen of the Fairies lies in her bower, surrounded by an arch of tiny intertwining goblins playing plant-shaped trumpets, referring, the texts tell us, to the “psychoactive properties of plants”. Puck (1841) looks even more likely to have aroused the interest of subsequent generations interested in exploring just such properties. The “mischievous sprite” from the play, looking like a very knowing baby, sits atop a giant mushroom, illuminated from behind by the moon as a host of naked fairies dance around him.
The following year Dadd accompanied the wealthy lawyer and politician Thomas Phillips on a journey to the Near East, which Dadd was to record in drawings and paintings. But Dadd found the fast pace of the travel, unfamiliar cultures and the need to keep up his sketchbook work very disorienting. While Phillips found Dadd gentle and obliging in the early stages of the trip, his journals record that he felt much less “safe” in Dadd‘s company as the artist began to experience delusions, imagining himself possessed by the Egyptian god Osiris. None of this is remotely apparent in Dadd’s meticulously observed sketches and watercolours. By the time of his return to London in May 1843, Dadd, who we now understand to have suffered from schizophrenia, was experiencing severe psychosis. Three months later, he killed his father, believing him to be a devil.
Confined indefinitely in the criminal department of Bethlem Hospital – hence “bedlam” – he went on producing highly accomplished works drawing inspired by his eastern journey. The Artists Halt in the Desert (1845), with its group of top-hatted Europeans seated around a campfire under the stars, is one of the very few Orientalist paintings to show what these 19th-century observers of the East might have looked like to the local people. On a completely different note, one might almost say planet, the large and fanatically detailed The Flight Out of Egypt (1845) feels like a piece of Victorian “outsider art” – from a territory way beyond conventional artistic norms. A wild clamour of desert nomads, dancing girls and Roman soldiers crowd around a central palm tree in a scene that merges two biblical narratives: Moses’ exodus from Egypt, and the Holy Family’s escape into Egypt over a thousand years later. The wall text apologises for the use of “racial caricatures”, notably in a black figure in the foreground, the disconcerting rendering of the figure’s grinning features in a style closer to commercial illustration than classical painting.
If we imagine life in Victorian asylums such as Bethlem and the infamous Broadmoor, to which Dadd was later transferred, to have been truly hellish, Dadd’s art was encouraged by his doctors and carers. His uncannily still portraits of them feel positively surreal. In Portrait of a Young Man (1853), the looming foliage and chair formed of wildly curving branches feel more alive than the blank-faced subject.
Dadd’s return to fairy subjects brought about his most famous paintings. In the Fairy Feller‘s Master Stroke (1855-64), inspired by a speech from Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab – “midwife of the fairies” – waits as an axe-wielding henchman splits a nut, the shell of which will form the carriage in which she travels to plant dreams in ordinary mortals’ heads. Most of the scene takes place on the hat brim of one of these dreamers, an elderly sleeping man, while blades of grass the height of trees cut across the foreground. The detail in the fantastically dressed fairy figures, and the textures of flowers and plants, crowding every inch of this relatively tiny painting – just 21 x 15 inches – is so densely intricate the surface has an encrusted, jewel-like quality.
Yet it looks positively plain beside the larger Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58), in which the Shakespearean couple’s rivalry and jealousy have thrown nature into a turmoil of decaying foliage, butterflies, carousing fairies and dancing satyrs so densely packed it’s exhausting trying to pick them apart. While the wall text claims these works, which took up to a decade to complete, “combine classical, baroque and rococo modes of representation”, the use of form and space feels driven less by art historical nitpicking than a need to imagine a genuinely magical world. Staring into Dadd’s manically crowded spaces, with their sudden changes in scale between gigantic humans and pocket-sized fauns and centaurs plunging through hedgerows, is a deliciously disorientating experience.
Later biblical scenes, Middle Eastern landscapes and imaginings of a Victorian everyday life that Dadd probably never saw once he’d been imprisoned, all show a quirky individuality and an extraordinary capacity for memory. Yet nothing comes close to those great fairy masterpieces. When last subjected to public scrutiny at a Tate exhibition in 1974, they seemed the gloriously weird products of a tragically disordered mind. Now, however, at a time when we have a greater understanding of mental health, it’s possible to see that these works have their own clarity and logic in the way they construct their imaginary worlds. The exhibition doesn’t attempt to draw wider meanings from them. But if you happen to want to go to Fairyland, you won’t do it more convincingly than by looking closely at these extraordinary paintings.
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 25 July until 25 October
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