The life of the artist Richard Dadd “makes for quite a story”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Dadd (1817-86) was a talented painter who began to display signs of schizophrenia during a tour of the Near East.
Then in 1843, he murdered his father during a “psychotic episode”, believing him to be a devil. He spent the rest of his life incarcerated in Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) and Broadmoor, where he continued to paint; the bustling fairy scenes he created are some of the “most haunting” images in the history of British art. He was almost forgotten until the 1960s, when his exquisitely precise, visionary works became popular in the hippy era. Dadd has remained a cult figure ever since, but in an era of greater mental health awareness, it feels timely that the Royal Academy (where he trained as a young man) is revisiting his art with unprecedented sensitivity. The first major exhibition devoted to this archetypal “outsider” in more than 50 years, it surveys his entire career and poses the question: how did mental illness affect Dadd’s paintings?
The show encourages us to see Dadd as more than a “mad” artist, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. And it’s true that he was already “remarkable” before his incarceration. Fairies – a common subject in the Victorian era – were his “hit theme”: not “Disneyfied fairies”, but the “sinister and destructive” beings seen in Shakespeare. His Puck, for instance, is “personified as a giant baby irradiated by lunar light”, perched on a toadstool. Dadd’s paintings from Bedlam, however, are “brutally different”.
His “masterpiece”, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, painted over nine years from 1855, represents a total break with existing pictorial convention: between tall, magnified strands of grass and vegetation you can make out “a detailed portrayal of fairy society”. The “tiny folk” are not beautiful, but often malformed – as if he were showing us “natural history specimens observed through a microscope”. In the end, “you can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it.”
Dadd wasn’t a true outsider artist, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. He was “trained as well as talented”, as the “dull”, conventional opening room shows. Even in the asylum, he remained “in sync with mainstream Victorian art”: there are costumes, Orientalist themes, pre-Raphaelite touches. Yet the “originality of his vision” is never in doubt – Dadd’s art was singular, hallucinatory, and enlivened by an “ironic wit”. Even his conventional travel scenes have strange, surrealist-like touches: “The Artist’s Halt in the Desert” (c.1845) shows the Moon skewered by a lance, “like a marshmallow on a stick”. Dadd gave form to “those shadowy, sometimes bedevilling thoughts that dwell in the hinterland of consciousness” – and this is a weird but “compelling” exhibition.
Royal Academy, London W1. Until 25 October