Richard Dadd: madness and fantasy

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Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum

Nicholas Tromans

Richard Dadd, said to be the most brilliant young artist of his generation, murdered his father, spent over 40 years in two of the most famous lunatic asylums in England (‘Bedlam’ and Broadmoor), where he never stopped painting,  deserves a serious and full account of his life and work, which we now have in this book.

The Tate Gallery exhibited all Dadd’s available work in 1974, and Nicolas Tromans points out that little new information on Dadd has emerged since then. A great deal has been written on the field of psychiatry, on the other hand, including historical, theoretical and medical exposées of Victorian institutional practice. In a fairly academic read, Tromons brings these elements together.

The book presents a full background to the life of the talented young Dadd, launching himself into the London art world, joining a successful artist clique from the Academy, exhibiting and selling work, such as his giddyingly detailed scenes from Shakespeare: Puck  (1841), for example. Critics of the time announced ‘Mr Dadd is on the right road to fame’, yet warned of the need to distinguish ‘the imagination from the absurd’.

As companion-draughtsman to a gentleman tourist, Dadd then embarked on a non-stop tour of the Middle East, becoming part of British art’s Orientalist movement of the 1840s. Overwhelmed by religious matters, heat and exhaustion, the artist rushed home, behaving so oddly his friends and family began to fear for his sanity and safety. Perhaps fearing hospitalization and under delusions about some form of Egyptian religious sacrifice, Dadd suddenly attacked and killed his father. He fled to France, where he attacked again but was arrested, taken into custody and sent back to Britain. There, Dadd was pronounced a ‘criminal lunatic’ without trial, and admitted as an insane patient to Bethlem Hospital, popularly known as ‘Bedlam’, in 1844. 

Tromans notes the progress away from the notorious practice whereby caged patients were used to entertain visitors to a somewhat better regime of non-restraint. He reminds the reader of the philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of Victorian institutional hypocrisies. An example of this was that many of Dadd’s most important artworks, including his disturbing  The Child’s Problem  of 1857 and the astonishingly ambitious miniaturized world of  The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke  –  a ‘delirium of description’ painted between 1855 and 1864 – remained unseen for years as Bethlam’s Physician-Superintendant neither displayed them nor allowed them outside.

In 1864 Dadd was transferred to Broadmoor, where patients were strongly encouraged to work, and he continued to draw and paint works ranging from Christmas cards to large-scale stage pieces until his death in 1886. He was buried in Broadmoor’s own cemetery. 

Dadd spent almost all his adult life inside asylums.  Since (despite doctor’s notes recording delusions) his mental health allowed him to read, write, draw and paint a great deal over the years, Tromans’ excellent book pulls no punches about the ‘vacuum’ of care he received over that time; effectively no therapy at all outside of his own work as an artist.  Though his art recovered some popularity and exposure over the 1960s and 1970s with the closing of Victorian asylums, as Tromons ironically points out, he now belongs, once again, to the Bethlam, as it owns the Dadd archive.

This book gives real insight into the life and works of an extraordinary and often unknown British painter, whose Shakespeare and Fairy paintings are unmatched anywhere for precision, their playing with scale or hauntingly surreal light. It is probably the only chance to see all his works in full colour, and given it represents the fullest range of illustrations of Dadd’s work ever collected together, with meticulous care, plus his life story, this hardback is well worth £25 for any student of or enthusiast for Victorian painting.

Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum  by Nicholas Tromans is published by Tate Publishing, 2011. 208 pp. 100 colour illus. ISBN 978-1-85437-959-7