The Royal Academy of Arts - Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd

Beyond Bedlam


The highly original works of Victorian artist Richard Dadd, best known for his fairy paintings, draw upon literature, legend and memory to portray elaborate worlds that radiate imaginative power.

The first years of Richard Dadd's life promised the conventional success of a highly talented British artist. The young Dadd was a student of the Royal Academy Schools and founding member of a group of artist-friends known as the Clique. In the early 1840s Dadd was already establishing himself as a painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes when he embarked on an ambitious trip across the Eastern Mediterranean that would inspire him for the rest of his life. On his return to Britain, Dadd began experiencing delusions, which led to him killing his father.

Dadd spent the rest of his life as a patient in Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals, where he was encouraged to continue producing oil paintings and watercolours of extraordinary delicacy and vividness. Despite Dadd's seclusion in the Victorian asylum system, he was able to draw upon his memory, imagination and abiding interest in literature and legends to render fantastical worlds replete with exquisite detail. These paintings and watercolours are among the most original and imaginative works in British art.