In the autumn of 1843, the influential journal Art-Union mourned “the late Richard Dadd”, an apparently kind and gentle man who a year or so earlier had been a rising star of London’s 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 and then to the new Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. As Art-Union concluded: “although the grave has not actually closed over him, he must be classed among the dead.”
At Bethlem, Dadd began painting again. Scenes remembered from his trip around the Eastern Mediterranean – when he first began suffering mental distress – were followed by portraiture allegory, satire, biblical scenes and intricately detailed fantasies, among them the unfinished The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which he painted between 1855 and 1864, while at Broadmoor. 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.
