In the autumn of 1843, the influential journal Art-Union mourned \u201cthe late Richard Dadd\u201d, an apparently kind and gentle man who a year or so earlier had been a rising star of London\u2019s Royal Academy. Today, Dadd is known, if at all, for having murdered his father while in the grip of severe psychosis, for which he was committed to Bethlem hospital asylum where he passed his remaining 43 years. As Art-Union concluded: \u201calthough the grave has not actually closed over him, he must be classed among the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Bethlem, Dadd began painting again. Scenes remembered from his trip around the Eastern Mediterranean \u2013 when he first began suffering mental distress \u2013 were followed by portraiture allegory, satire, biblical scenes and intricately detailed fantasies, among them the unfinished The Fairy Feller\u2019s Master-Stroke, which he painted between 1855 and 1864. By now he was more patient than artist, and the prism of mental illness through which his work came to be understood has never fully shifted.<\/p>\n
\u2018His style changes, but his subjects remain the same\u2019 \u2026 Titania Sleeping, 1841. Photograph: \u00a9 GrandPalaisRmn (mus\u00e9e du Louvre) \/ Jean-Gilles Berizzi<\/p>\n
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam at the Royal Academy is the first major exhibition to be dedicated to the artist in more than 50 years. Returning him to his alma mater places the emphasis on Dadd the artist, and in the same spirit his medical records will be omitted from the exhibition, his illness and crime referred to only briefly. Freed from the narrative of the asylum, Dadd\u2019s career can be viewed as a coherent whole, explains co-curator Sylvie Broussine: \u201cThe before and after narrative is reductive: his style changes, but that happens with many different artists in all different circumstances. A number of his subjects remain the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Broussine points to Dadd\u2019s enduring interest in Shakespeare, whose stories he spun into highly wrought fantasies, consistent with his early decision to specialise in imaginative subjects. If Dadd\u2019s retreat into fairyland has been understood as a symptom of his detachment from reality, a vista in the exhibition, Titania Sleeping, exhibited at the RA in 1841, shown with The Fairy Feller\u2019s Master-Stroke, suggests that such a reading is overly simplistic.<\/p>\n
\u2018His characters do not seem to look at each other\u2019 \u2026 Bacchanalian Scene, 1862. Photograph: Oliver Cowling & RodTidnam\/\u00a9 Tate \/ Tate Images<\/p>\n
Jennifer Higgie, author of Bedlam, a novel published to coincide with the exhibition agrees up to a point: \u201cBut his language intensified \u2013 you can\u2019t look at The Fairy Feller\u2019s Master-Stroke without noticing a certain mania in the way he painted it \u2013 in its incredible intricacy and focus on detail.\u201d Bedlam is the latest in a substantial body of creative works inspired by Dadd, which include Angela Carter\u2019s 1979 radio play Come Unto These Yellow Sands<\/a>, and Queen\u2019s 1974 song The Fairy Feller\u2019s Master-Stroke<\/a>. The urge to get inside Dadd\u2019s mind is apparently irresistible.<\/p>\n No one has thought longer and harder on this subject than Nicholas Tromans, leading Dadd authority and the co-curator of the exhibition. When Dadd was first rediscovered in the mid 20th century, he was treated more as a medical case study than as an artist, as part of a fashionable belief that art was an effective diagnostic tool. Tromans distanced himself from this now discredited approach in the preface to his 2011 book Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, in which he wrote: \u201cNo more than were I writing about JMW Turner or Claude Monet have I pretended to know exactly what he thought and felt whilst making his pictures\u201d.<\/p>\n He was treated more as a medical case study than as an artist \u2026 Portrait of a Young Man, 1853. Photograph: Sonal Bakrania\/\u00a9 Tate \/ Tate Images<\/p>\n And yet, he says: \u201cI like to point out that his characters never seem to interact, his figures never talk to each other or look at each other or say anything to each other. It\u2019s impossible not to see in that a reflection of what we know about him, which was that he was very cut off and did not tend to talk to other people very much.\u201d<\/p>\n