Portrait of the artist as a madman

Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its ‘long vistas of stately oaks and elms’, he wrote, ‘occasionally a startled hare’ ran with ‘the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds’. It was there on the morning of 29 August 1843 that a butcher from Rochester got a nasty surprise. He discovered the corpse of an apothecary named Robert Dadd; he had been battered and stabbed to death by his son Richard.

There is no doubt that Richard Dadd was far from sane. On the other hand, his loss of mental balance — though very bad in its consequences for his father — was the making of Dadd as an artist. Only after he became a homicidal maniac did he turn into a major painter.

A 26-year-old star of the early Victorian art world when he committed this terrible crime, Dadd spent the remaining 43 years of his life in psychiatric institutions, first Bethlem (or Bedlam) Hospital in London and then the newly founded Broadmoor. While living in Bedlam, Dadd, very slowly, produced his two masterpieces — ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ (1854–8) and ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (c. 1855–64) — both of which are on show in an exhibition at the Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford: The Art of Bedlam. This is small in size but, because of the nature of his art, it amounts to something approaching a retrospective. Its curator, Nicholas Tromans, is also the author of a book, Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, which reveals much new information about those long years of incarceration as a ‘criminal lunatic’.