{"id":816210,"date":"2026-07-21T11:06:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T11:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/816210\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T11:06:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T11:06:12","slug":"richard-dadd-beyond-bedlam-review-some-of-the-most-haunting-paintings-in-british-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/816210\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam review \u2013 Some of the most haunting paintings in British art"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. So what about his work, on show this summer at the Royal Academy<\/a>, where he began his career as a brilliantly talented student?<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfairy\u201d 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201coutsider art\u201d for which he is best known. <\/p>\n

A small group of student paintings are exactly what you\u2019d expect of an early 19th century \u201cmodel student\u201d at the Royal Academy: a slightly wishy-washy portrait of a friend in historical garb, a scene with Hamlet glimpsing his father\u2019s ghost, which the wall texts describe as leaning towards \u201cthe uncanny and the macabre\u201d, but feels like very standard student fare of time. <\/p>\n

\"RichardRichard Dadd, ‘Puck’, 1841. Oil on canvas, 59.2 x 59.2 cm. The Harris, Preston (Acquired with support from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Art Fund, Arts Council England via a bequest from Mrs Wade, and the Friends of the Harris, 2011)<\/p>\n

Yet Dadd\u2019s first \u201cfairy\u201d paintings, visionary imaginings of Shakespeare\u2019s A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, made his reputation when he was just 24. While initially influenced by the then stellar 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 \u201cpsychoactive properties of plants\u201d. Puck (1841) looks even more likely to have aroused the interest of subsequent generations interested in exploring just such properties. The \u201cmischievous sprite\u201d from the Dream, 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. <\/p>\n

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 \u201csafe\u201d in Dadd\u2018s company as the artist began to experience delusions, imagining himself possessed by the Egyptian god Osiris. None of this is remotely apparent in Dadd\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Confined indefinitely in the criminal department of Bethlem Hospital \u2013 hence \u201cbedlam\u201d \u2013 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 camp-fire under the stars is one of the very few Orientalist paintings to show what these 19th 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 \u201coutsider art\u201d \u2013 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\u2019s exodus from Egypt, and the Holy Family\u2019s escape into Egypt, over a thousand years later. The wall text apologises for the use of \u201cracial caricatures\u201d, notably in a black figure in the foreground, the disconcerting rendering of the figure\u2019s grinning features in a style closer to commercial illustration than classical painting. <\/p>\n

\"RichardRichard Dadd, \u2018Titania Sleeping\u2019, 1841. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 77.5 cm. Paris, Mus\u00e9e du Louvre, Department of Paintings (\u00a9 GrandPalaisRmn (mus\u00e9e du Louvre) \/ Jean-Gilles Berizzi)<\/p>\n

If we would imagine life in Victorian asylums such as Bethlem and the infamous Broadmoor, to which Dadd was later transferred, to have been truly hellish, Dadd\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

Dadd\u2019s return to fairy subjects brought about his most famous paintings. In the Fairy Feller\u2018s Master Stroke (1855-64), inspired by a speech from Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab \u2013 \u201cmid-wife of the fairies\u201d \u2013 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\u2019 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 \u2013 just 21 x 15 inches \u2013 is so densely intricate the surface has an encrusted, jewel-like quality. <\/p>\n

\"RichardRichard Dadd, ‘The Fairy Feller\u2019s 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)<\/p>\n

Yet it looks positively plain beside the larger Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58), in which the Shakespearean couple\u2019s rivalry and jealousy have thrown nature into a turmoil of decaying foliage, butterflies, carousing fairies and dancing satyrs so densely packed it\u2019s exhausting trying to pick them apart. While the wall text claims these works, which took up to a decade to complete, \u201ccombine classical, baroque and rococo modes of representation\u201d 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\u2019s manically crowded spaces, with their sudden changes in scale between gigantic humans and pocket-sized fauns and centaurs plunging through the hedgerows is a deliciously disorientating experience.<\/p>\n

Later biblical scenes, middle eastern landscapes and imaginings of a Victorian everyday life Dadd probably never saw once he\u2019d gone inside, 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\u2019s possible to see that these works have their own clarity and logic in the way they construct their imaginary worlds. The exhibition doesn\u2019t attempt to draw wider meanings from them. But if you happen to want to go to Fairyland, you won\u2019t do it more convincingly than by looking closely at these extraordinary paintings.<\/p>\n

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 25 July until 25 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The life of Richard Dadd makes for quite a story. The painter murdered his father during a psychotic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":816211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-816210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}