Richard Dadd
A young artist with a promising career but he spent most of his life incarcerated, which is where he created some of his most iconic works. But what happened? And how did he get to be so well known after his death?
Dadd’s Early Life
Before we get into the real stuff we’re going to discuss today, let’s rewind and talk about Richard Dadd before he was an artist. He was born on August 1, 1817 in Chatham, Kent, England as one of seven children. They were all raised by their father, Robert Dadd, a chemist, after their mother, Mary Ann, died very young.
He was educated at King’s School in Rochester where his talent and aptitude for drawing was apparent to everyone at a very young age. At 20 he was admitted to the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts in London where he was awarded the medal for life drawing in 1840. In the late 1830s, Dadd formed an exclusive group called The Clique with fellow artists Agustus Egg, Alfred Elmore, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O’Neil, John Phillip, and Edward Matthew Ward. This group’s ethos was to reject what they saw as the pretentious world of academic art and instead it was mostly a sketching group. They would all meet and sketch the same subject matter then have their pieces judged by “non-artists”. This group was extremely well known and respected at the time and Dadd was poised to be a successful and famous artist.
The Trip
In July 1842, Sir Thomas Phillips, a Welsh lawyer, politician, and former mayor of Newport, approached Dadd with a proposition. He was embarking on a ten-month trip through parts of Europe, Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt and he wanted an artist to accompany him, he specifically wanted Dadd to accompany him. They travelled extensively with Dadd filling sketchbooks with drawings and half-finished paintings to be completed upon their return to England. However, something was changing within Dadd himself during the trip, especially during their last leg in Egypt while travelling up the Nile when his personality suddenly shifted dramatically.
Dadd became frequently agitated and violent as he rambled incoherently about Egyptian gods and he became increasingly difficult to understand. His travelling companions said that he was suffering sun stroke and Phillips grew pretty scared of the artist so they parted ways and Dadd went home in the spring of 1843. When he got home he stayed out of the sun to try and get himself back to normal but his mind didn’t return to the way it was before he left for the trip and he was diagnosed with having an “unsound mind” (people now think he was exhibiting signs of schizophrenia). He and his family even moved to the rural village of Cobham, hoping that would help make a difference.
Cobham
Moving to Cobham didn’t really make a difference and Dadd’s condition continued to deteriorate until everything culminated on the evening of August 29, 1843 when Dadd convinced his father, Robert, to go for a walk with him in Cobham Park. On this walk something inside him snapped and he attacked his father out no nowhere, punching him in the head before slashing his throat and fatally stabbing him in the chest. Once the deed was done he “raised his arms and yelled to the sky “Go, and tell the great god Osiris that I have done the deed which is to set him free”” (Blake, 2019).
Dadd was under the delusion that he was the son of the Egyption god Osirus and that the man on the walk with him, his actual father Robert, was an imposter. So he felt like the only option he had was to kill him.
Dadd then fled the park and embarked on what he believed to be his next mission; to go to Austria and kill Emperor of Austria Ferdinand I. He made it to France, slashing someone else with a razor blade along the way (don’t worry they didn’t die) before he was caught on September 1, 1843. As soon as he was caught he confessed to the murder and told police all about his real father Osirus and how Robert was an evil impersonator who needed to die. As a result of this Dadd spent the next ten months Clermont, a French asylum, before coming back to England for his trial and being committed to the criminal wing of Bethlem Royal Hospital.
Bethlem (Bedlam) Royal Hospital
Although Dadd’s mental health didn’t improve much at Bethlem, it was here that he was encouraged to create art again by his doctors. He is described in hospital records as “a violent and dangerous patient, for he would jump up and strike a violent blow without any aggravation, and then beg pardon for the deed” (Blake, 2019).
He was provided with art supplies and he found that in the asylum he was free from all the constraints of the academic art world, what he was trying to escape when he formed The Clique as well, and he could paint and draw whatever subject matter and in whatever style appealed to him. It was while in Bethlem that he created some of his most detailed and iconic works of art. His pieces ranged from portraits of his doctors to explorations of emotions like pride, love, agony-raving madness, jealousy, disappointment, and even murder. These offer an glimpse into Dadd’s ideas of human emotions and how he was processing his life and surroundings.
One piece of art that I want to talk about specifically is the incredibly intricate and detailed The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke which he started work on in 1855. The Tate Britain, where this painting now hangs, explains the scene like this “with the exception of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania, who appear in the top half of the picture, the figures are drawn entirely from the artist’s imagination. The main focus of the painting is the Fairy Feller himself, who raises his axe in readiness to split a large chestnut which will be used to construct Queen Mab’s new fairy carriage. In the centre of the picture the white-bearded patriarch raises his right hand, commanding the woodsman not to strike a blow until the signal is given. Meanwhile the rest of the fairy band — figures including, as per the children’s rhyme, ‘soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, ploughboy, apothecary, thief’ and ranging from tiny gnats and centaurs to a large dragonfly playing a trumpet — surround him, many looking on in anticipation, anxious to see whether the woodsman will succeed in splitting the nut with one stroke” (Roberts, 2024).
Interestingly, amongst all these characters and the scene going on with the splitting of the chestnut there is something else happening in the painting too. At the top of the scene we see a white haired man holding a pestle over a stone mortar, this is thought to represent Robert Dadd, Dadd’s father. Beside him a young boy, presumably Dadd himself, reaches out for his coat and we see a substance that looks like blood pouring from his fingers. Robert is holding the pestle like a knife ready to cut downwards and some have interpreted the younger boy’s posture as self defence. This may be an indication of how Dadd now saw his father’s murder; an act of self defence against someone he thought was an evil imposter. Dadd worked on this piece until 1864 and even after almost a decade he still considered it unfinished as the bottom left background is still only sketched in. Today, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is considered to be Dadd’s masterpiece.
A possible reason that Dadd never finished the painting was because he was transferred to Broadmoor, Britain’s first hospital for the clinically insane, in 1864. Even though he never finished painting the piece he went on to write a detailed account of all the characters represented within it.
Later Years
As I said before, his condition never got better while staying in incarceration at these different facilities. He still acted out sometimes in aggression and spoke of the need to set Osirus free even more than 30 years after his father’s death.
Regardless of his illness, he was still able to and drawn to painting and expressing himself artistically. Victoria Northwood, Director of the Museum of the Mind at Bethlem Royal Hospital said “after his incarceration his world became limited. He was not mixing with other artists. And yet he still felt the need, and was able, to create” (Kerley, 2015).
Dadd continued painting until he physically couldn’t anymore and he died on January 7, 1886 from “an extensive disease of the lungs” now commonly thought to be tuberculosis. He was 68 years old and had spent 42 years of his life confined to various institutions. After his death Dadd was a pretty much unknown artist until the 1960s and 1970s when his work and story were rediscovered and there was a surge of interest in his life and his incredibly detailed and beautiful paintings. Today they’re displayed at prestigious institutions around the world including the Tate Britain, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
Works Cited
Blake, Sarah J. “Dadd’s Murder: The Frightful Tale Behind the Famous Fairies”. Hushed Up History. 2019. https://husheduphistory.com/post/187691954773/dadds-murder-the-frightful-tale-behind-the
Kerley, Paul. “Richard Dadd: The Art of a “Criminal Lunatic” Murderer”. BBC News Magazine. 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34722937
Roberts, Adam. “Richard Dadd, The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke (1855-64)”. Medium. 2024. https://profadamroberts.medium.com/richard-dadd-the-fairy-fellers-master-stroke-1855-64-a100f21986a5