AN EXHIBITION OF THE WORK OF RICHARD DADD (1817-1886)

Richard Dadd was born on 1 August 1817 at Chatham in Kent, where his father was a chemist. He began drawing when he was about thirteen, and after the family had moved to London he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1837. He began exhibiting his work in the same year, and soon began to make a reputation with delicate and imaginative scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and other fairy subjects. He was considered to be one of the most promising young artists of his generation, and was also known for his gentleness and good nature.

At the age of twenty-five he was employed to travel with Sir Thomas Phillips through Europe and the Middle East, and make drawings of the places they visited. Towards the end of the ten-month journey he developed symptoms of severe mental disturbance, and was suffering from paranoid delusions by the time he reached home. He believed that he was persecuted by devils, and that he received messages from the Egyptian god Osiris. On 28 August 1843 he stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Rochester in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise.

Dadd fled to France intending to commit more murders, but was arrested after trying to cut the throat of a stranger with whom he was travelling in a coach. He spent ten months in a French asylum before being extradited, and on 22 August 1844 he was committed to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum which was then attached to Bethlem Hospital. For many years he was unpredictable and occasionally violent, and never completely lost his delusions. In 1864 he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Asylum in Berkshire, which was built to replace the criminal wings at Bethlem. He died there of consumption on 8 January 1886.

Dadd continued to paint throughout his forty-two years of confinement in Bethlem and Broadmoor. Probably his most famous works are The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), on display at Tate Britain and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58), in the Lloyd-Webber collection.

This exhibition traces his work from the start of his fateful journey through the Middle East and the onset of his madness, his work while at Bethlem Royal Hospital and his later work at Broadmoor.

The exhibition consists of 41 paintings owned by the Trustees of the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust and the Trustees of the West London Mental Health NHS Trust.

The exhibition is offered free of hire charge to further the Trustees’ policy of making the work of artists who have suffered mental illness available to a wider audience. Borrowers are required to arrange packing and transport and nail-to-nail insurance. Associated shop merchandise is available on a sale or return basis. The Trust’s Education and Outreach Officer is available for advice on programmes for schools.