Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd (1 August 1817 – 7 January 1886) was an English painter of the Victorian era, noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail Most of the works for which he is best known were created while he was a patient in a psychiatric hospital

Dadd was born at Chatham, Kent, England, the son of a chemist He was educated at King's School, Rochester where his aptitude for drawing was evident at an early age, leading to his admission to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 20 He was awarded the medal for life drawing in 1840 With William Powell Frith, Augustus Egg, Henry O'Neil and others, he founded The Clique, of which he was generally considered the leading talent He was also trained at William Dadson's Academy of Art

Among his best-known early works are the illustrations he produced for The Book of British Ballads (1842), and a frontispiece he designed for The Kentish Coronal (1840)

In July 1842, Sir Thomas Phillips, the former mayor of Newport, chose Dadd to accompany him as his draftsman on an expedition through Europe to Greece, Turkey, Southern Syria and finally Egypt In November of that year they spent a gruelling two weeks in Southern Syria, passing from Jerusalem to Jordan and returning across the Engaddi wilderness Toward the end of December, while travelling up the Nile by boat, Dadd underwent a dramatic personality change, becoming delusional, increasingly violent, and believing himself to be under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris His condition was initially thought to be sunstroke

On his return in the spring of 1843, he was diagnosed to be of unsound mind and was taken by his family to recuperate in the countryside village of Cobham, Kent In August of that year, having become convinced that his father was the Devil in disguise, Dadd killed him with a knife and fled to France En route to Paris, Dadd attempted to kill another tourist with a razor but was overpowered and arrested by police Dadd confessed to killing his father and was returned to England, where he was committed to the criminal department of Bethlem psychiatric hospital (also known as Bedlam) Here and subsequently at the newly created Broadmoor Hospital, Dadd was cared for in an enlightened manner by Drs William Wood, William Orange and Sir W Charles Hood

Dadd probably suffered from paranoid schizophrenia Two of his siblings were similarly afflicted, while a third had "a private attendant" for unknown reasons

In hospital Dadd was encouraged to continue painting, and in 1852 he created a remarkable portrait of one of his doctors, Alexander Morison He painted many of his masterpieces in Bethlem and Broadmoor, including The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which he worked on between 1855 and 1864 Also dating from the 1850s are the 33 watercolour drawings titled Sketches to Illustrate the Passions, which include Grief or Sorrow, Love, and Jealousy, as well as Agony-Raving Madness and Murder Like most of his works these are executed on a small scale and feature protagonists whose eyes are fixed in a peculiar, unfocused stare Dadd also produced many shipping scenes and landscapes during his incarceration, such as the ethereal 1861 watercolour Port Stragglin These are executed with a miniaturist's eye for detail which belie the fact that they are products of imagination and memory

After 20 years at Bethlem, Dadd was moved to Broadmoor Hospital, a high security facility outside London Here he remained, painting constantly and receiving infrequent visitors until 7 January 1886, when he died "from an extensive disease of the lungs" A number of his works remain on display at Broadmoor

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke inspired a song of the same name by the British rock band Queen The painting also is a plot element in The Witches of Chiswick by Robert Rankin The Wee Free Men, a novel by Terry Pratchett, published in 2003, was partly inspired by it as well The Hum and the Shiver by Alex Bledsoe includes references to a lost version of the painting The painting and the artist are also referenced in Elizabeth Hand's novel Mortal Love

The British fantasy writer Angela Carter wrote Come unto these Yellow Sands, a radio-play based on Dadd's life

The full name of the eccentric character Mr Dick in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens is Richard Babley, which echoes the name of Dickens' contemporary Richard Dadd Canadian author RJ Anderson acknowledges Dadd as the basis of her fictional painter Alfred Wrenfield, who figures prominently in her young adult fantasy novel Knife (Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter in the USA)

In 1987 a long-lost watercolour by Dadd, The Artist's Halt in the Desert, was discovered by Peter Nahum on the BBC TV programme Antiques Roadshow Made while the artist was incarcerated, it is based on sketches made during his tour of the Middle East, and shows his party encamped by the Dead Sea, with Dadd at the far right It was later sold for £100,000 to the British Museum

Works:
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke Tate Britain
Richard Dadd painted this work in the Bethlem Hospital where he was sent after murdering his father and being declared insane. The scene was drawn from his imagination. It shows the 'fairy-feller' poised to split a large chestnut which will be used to construct Queen Mab's new fairy carriage. The style, subject and shifting scale of the painting all contribute to a sense of the fantastic that fits the critic Herbert Read's idea of an imaginative tradition running through to Surrealism in the early twentieth century.

Wandering Musicians Tate Britain
This work was partly based on memories and sketches made by the artist on his 1842 tour of Europe and the Middle East. The open landscape is an unusual feature in the paintings Dadd made after his imprisonment and it is likely to have been based on views from the terrace at Broadmoor asylum. The figures of the musicians were probably drawn from inmates, while the instruments were observed from those owned by Dadd who was a passionate musician. The theme may derive from the Idylls of Theocritus, the Ancient Greek pastoral poet whose name appears on the broken frieze in the foreground.

Caravanserai at Mylasa in Asia Minor Yale Center for British Art

Mercy: David Spareth Saul's Life The J. Paul Getty Museum
King David exemplified mercy and self-restraint in preventing his companion Abishai from killing the sleeping King Saul (1 Samuel 26: 5-10). The simple, dramatic composition and statuesque main figures give this small, slightly eerie, moonlit scene a monumental quality. Yet the rhythm from the flowing movement and patterns of the garments enlivens the rocky desert setting and prevents the composition from being purely static. Richard Dadd's lightened palette, fascination with detail, and interest in decorative patterning typify mid-1800s English painting. For authenticity, Dadd selected motifs from Egyptian wall reliefs, Roman sculpture, his own memories, and possibly his own travel sketches of the desert and cliffs near the Dead Sea. To show this Old Testament subject, rarely seen in Victorian painting, Dadd mixed historical events, modern passions, and perhaps personal associations. After delusions led him to kill his father in 1843, he continued making art while confined to a mental hospital. Thinking that Dadd might cultivate David's moral virtues as an antidote to his own murderous compulsions, his doctor may even have suggested this subject.

Fish Market by the Sea Yale Center for British Art

Hamlet and his Mother; The Closet Scene Yale Center for British Art

Negation Yale Center for British Art

The Flight out of Egypt Tate Britain
This painting has become known as The Flight out of Egypt but Dadd didn't give it a title. He travelled in the Near East from 1842 to 1843, and saw an encampment of Muslim pilgrims near Damascus, which may have been the starting point for this image. The Hajj is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, and historically Damascus and Cairo were two of the most famous meeting points, from where tens of thousands of Muslims would embark for Mecca. Strangely, Dadd seems to have crammed different histories and cultures of Egypt and the Holy Land into one place.

Augustus Egg Yale Center for British Art
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