Beyond Bedlam: the Royal Academy Reopens the Case of Richard Dadd

There are painters we admire, and there are painters we cannot quite look away from. Richard Dadd belongs firmly to the second group. This month the Royal Academy of Arts opens Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, running from 25 July to 25 October, and it is the first large-scale survey of his work in more than fifty years. For anyone who has ever stood before a small, obsessively detailed Victorian picture and felt the ground shift slightly beneath them, this is the exhibition of the summer.

A talent, then a tragedy

Dadd was born in Chatham, Kent, in 1817, and by his early twenties he was one of the most promising young artists in London. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools, won medals, and moved in a bright circle of ambitious painters. Had his story continued along that line, we might remember him today as a gifted but conventional figure of the early Victorian scene.

Instead, in 1842 he set off on a long tour of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East as draughtsman to a wealthy patron. Somewhere along the Nile his mental health collapsed. He returned convinced he was acting under the direction of the Egyptian god Osiris, and in 1843, in a field near Cobham, he killed his father. He fled to France, was arrested, and spent the remaining forty-three years of his life confined, first in the criminal wing of Bethlem Hospital in London, the institution whose old nickname gives this exhibition its title, and later at Broadmoor.

It would be easy for a show to lean on that biography as spectacle. What makes Dadd worth returning to is that the confinement did not end his art. It concentrated it.

The work made behind the walls

The pictures Dadd produced as a patient are astonishing precisely because of the conditions in which they were made. Encouraged by enlightened medical staff who recognised his gift, he worked slowly and with microscopic care, building up surfaces of jewel-like colour and packing his compositions with figures, foliage and half-hidden faces. Time, which he had in enormous quantity, became his medium as much as paint.

The most famous result is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, painted between 1855 and 1864 and now held by Tate. It is a small panel, but it repays hours of looking: a woodland court of fairies, gnomes and grandees frozen around a woodsman raising his axe, every blade of grass rendered as though under a lens. The painting reached Tate in 1963 as a gift from the war poet Siegfried Sassoon, and it has since seeped into wider culture, most memorably lending its name to a song by the band Queen. The Academy has secured its loan, and seeing it in the company of Dadd’s other late works is a rare privilege.

What the exhibition brings together

Beyond Bedlam gathers around a hundred works, spanning oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, and arranges them chronologically so that the arc of a life becomes legible. Visitors move from the confident early London years, through the sketches made on his travels, and into the long, strange, luminous period of his confinement. It is a structure that lets the art, rather than the crime, set the pace.

The show is curated by Nicholas Tromans, a leading authority on the artist, with associate curator Sylvie Broussine, and it draws on major loans from institutions including Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Yale Center for British Art. That spread matters. Dadd’s output is scattered across public and private collections, and assembling this much of it under one roof is the kind of feat that happens perhaps once in a generation.

Why he still matters

Dadd sits at an awkward, fascinating crossroads. He is a Victorian fairy painter, part of a peculiarly British nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the supernatural in art. He is also, unavoidably, one of the earliest and most striking examples of what later ages would call outsider art, work made outside the ordinary channels of the market and the academy. And he raises questions we still find difficult: how we look at art made in extremity, how we separate the maker from the deed, and whether creativity and suffering are as entwined as the Romantic imagination liked to believe.

For newer collectors and gallery-goers, Dadd is also a useful reminder that British art history is far stranger and richer than its greatest hits suggest. Alongside the landscapes and the portraits sits this quiet, meticulous man, painting fairies in a hospital cell with a patience that borders on the devotional.

Making the trip

The exhibition is at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly, open Tuesday to Sunday with late Friday hours, and tickets start at around £15, with under-16s and Academy Friends admitted free. If you go, resist the urge to move quickly. Dadd never did, and his pictures ask the same of us. Stand close, let your eye wander into the undergrowth, and you will start to understand why, more than a century after his death, we are still unable to look away.