Richard Dadd, artist, began to suffer delusions in 1843; his father, Robert, however, was reluctant to consign him to the care of doctors. Overruling advice from Dr Alexander Sutherland, who believed that Richard would be dangerous when certain hallucinations came upon him, Robert took his son away from London to the Kent village of Cobham, in the hope that the countryside would calm him down and ease his psychological troubles. The pair stayed at the Ship Inn, pictured below (under scaffolding for refurbishment when I took this).

But on 28 August 1843, on a walk in Cobham Park, Richard stabbed his father to death, believing that the Egyptian god Osiris had instructed him to do so. He fled abroad, attempted to stab a fellow traveller and was detained in France. On his return to England he was found unfit to plead and was sent to Royal Bethlem Hospital. He would remain in detention for the rest of his life, which lasted 43 more years.

The spot where the killing took place was, for about 100 years, called Dadd’s Hole. Charles Dickens, who was a near contemporary of Dadd’s and like Dadd had lived in Chatham as a child, would take friends to see the spot. The murder site lay just off the main roadway in the park (now a grassed over avenue) and the body had been easily spotted by a passer by.

Below are pictures of Dadd’s Hole (in long-shot and close-up), which is now fenced off due to very uneven and unstable ground; the long avenue that runs nearby, through the Park; and the 1909 Ordnance Survey map that shows the Hole, just above the “O” of the lowest “Cobham”.

Below the pictures is my review of the Dadd exhibition at the Watts Gallery near Guildford in Surrey a while back. It was the first major retrospective for many years.




Review of ‘The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd’ exhibition at The Watts Gallery, published in The Lancet, 11 July 2015
Perhaps more than is the case with any other artist, the appreciation of Richard Dadd’s work is affected by knowledge of his biography. We scour each picture for “meaning” – for references to his killing of his father, for diagnostic signs of incipient madness (in his pre-1843 creations) and of full-blown delusion in the paintings that poured out of him during his 42 years in detention as a “criminal lunatic”.

The complexity of Dadd’s “fairy” paintings, in particular, can send the viewer off into mundane and reductive musings. On the one hand, we might suppose, as we gaze at Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-58) or The Faery-Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), that lavishing such huge attention on microscopic detail may be indicative of an obsessional mind; but then again, we can see that the intricate planning and complicated, coherent storytelling show that Dadd’s intellect was unimpaired for long stretches of time.

Dadd maintained a sense of humour, despite the horrific turn his life had taken: at the age of 26 he stabbed his father to death, acting on the instructions of the Egyptian god Osiris. Anticipating that people would try to read his paintings for indicators of his mental state, he wrote a long “explanatory” verse about The Fairy-Feller – which carefully revealed nothing. In this poem, he included the line (echoing the masterpiece on vexed fatherhood, King Lear): “For nought and nothing it explains and nothing from nothing nothing gains.”

The Watts Gallery show The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd focuses on the works produced before the artist’s July 1864 transfer to the new Broadmoor facility. Upon being found not guilty of murder by virtue of insanity, Dadd was committed to the criminal wing of Royal Bethlehem Hospital, where the eminent doctors Edward Thomas Monro (1789-1856) and Alexander Morison (1779-1866) oversaw his care. The Watts is itself a rather Dadd-like venue: a gem of a gallery that you feel you have just tripped over in a dell deep in luxuriant Surrey countryside – hidden away, like the faery world in the undergrowth. In its current exhibition, all Dadd’s major phases are represented – the faery paintings, as noted; the scenes inspired by his travels to southern Europe and the Middle East; his fascinating series Sketches to Illustrate the Passions (1853-7); and two large, linked oils, the first of Morison, an old man staring blankly from the frame, and the second (below), an unnamed young man in an exotic, lush landscape, likely to be Dr Charles Hood (1824-70). Dadd was in Bethlem Hospital during a time of controversy and huge transition, and his paintings were eagerly “acquired” by both the under-fire old guard of Monro and Morison, as well as the new brooms – Hood and head steward George Henry Haydon.

Dadd’s mental crisis had come on during his exhausting whistlestop Grand Tour of the Mediterranean and Asia Minor in 1842/3. The bewildering range of faces, terrains, costumes, ancient ruins and cityscapes provided him with years of stored memories for paintings. The View of the Island of Rhodes (below) and The Artist’s Halt in the Desert (both c. 1845) are likely to have been among the earliest of Dadd’s Bethlehem pictures. The former shows the minutest of brushstrokes detailing the parched rocks of the Greek island. The latter exemplifies a Dadd-ian specialism – a vast, dark-blue night sky, pierced by moonlight, and in the foreground a huddle of softly lit figures. (Halt, by the way, remains one of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow’s most stunning re-discoveries; having spent decades unrecognised in a Barnstaple attic, it was bought in 1986 for £100,000 by the British Museum.)

Several of Dadd’s Passions are on display – many of them are send-ups of his carers’ own dabblings in the visual arts. Morison had been one of the first British doctors to compile guides showing how a particular mental “disease” revealed itself in a patient’s face. (An illustration of a worried-looking woman would be captioned “Religious Monomaniac”, and so on.) Artist Charles Gow, who knew Dadd, came to Bethlehem to undertake physiognomical studies for Morison. Dadd satirises such over-confident pathologising in such Passion watercolours as Patriotism (1857), with two elderly sea-faring coves gazing greedily at a map featuring imaginary locations that include Great Pains Bay and Island of Implication. The faces that Morison found so easy to read for illness, in Dadd’s works are ambiguous or inscrutable. As in the oeuvre of John Tenniel (a near contemporary and one-time colleague of Dadd’s), characters gurn, leer, express wide-eyed astonishment, ludicrous puffed-up fury, or inexplicable haughtiness and froideur – they are funny and unnerving at the same time. Just as in Tenniel’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, many of Dadd’s subjects seem locked into their own private world, not interacting with each other, and blankly self-referential.

The exhibition also features archival material relating to Dadd’s confinement and the institutional regimes under which his artistry actually thrived. Liberated from caring what the public or potential art-buyers would approve of, Dadd’s creativity found freedom behind bars.

The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd, Watts Gallery, Down Lane, Compton, nr Guildford, Surrey UK, until Nov 1, 2015.  http://www.wattsgallery.org.uk