Richard Dadd’s Strange and Delicate Worlds
A retrospective at London’s Royal Academy examines the full career of Richard Dadd (1817–1882), a Victorian painter trained at the Royal Academy and recognized within The Clique artistic circle. While best known for ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (1855–64)—a minutely detailed oil painting of fantastical woodland scenes executed over nearly a decade during his incarceration at Bethlem Royal Hospital—the exhibition surveys his broader oeuvre of mystical landscapes and intricate figurative work. Dadd’s biography shifted dramatically after a 1843 psychotic episode in which he murdered his father and fled to France; upon arrest he was committed to Bethlem’s criminal ward, where he remained institutionalized. The curators deliberately resist framing Dadd’s meticulously crafted output as outsider art, instead positioning him within Victorian painting discourse while deferring clinical interpretation to the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, from which loans derive.
Original article published on Hyperallergic — AI-generated summary. Visit the website to read the full article at the source. Image via Hyperallergic.
