Painter, born in Chatham, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools, travelled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and was considered a promising young artist. However, in 1843 he suffered a mental breakdown, murdered his father, and spent the rest of his life in asylums. He is best known for the fantastically detailed fairy paintings which made up the bulk of his output after his incarceration.
Richard Dadd (August 1, 1817 – January 7, 1886) was a Victorian painter noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail.
Life and work
Dadd was born at Chatham, Medway in Kent, the son of a chemist.
In July of 1842 Sir Thomas Phillips, the former mayor of Newport, chose Dadd to accompany him as his draftsman on an expedition through Europe to Greece, Turkey, Palestine and finally Egypt.
On his return in the spring of 1843, he was diagnosed to be of unsound mind and was taken by his family to recuperate in the countryside village of Cobham, Kent. In August of that year, having become convinced that his father was the Devil in disguise, Dadd murdered him with a knife and fled for France. En route to Paris Dadd attempted to murder another tourist with a razor, but was unsuccessful and was arrested by the police. Dadd confessed to the murder of his father and was returned to England, where he was committed to the criminal department of Bethlem psychiatric hospital (also known as Bedlam).
In the hospital he was allowed to continue to paint and it was here that many of his masterpieces were created, including his most celebrated painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which he worked on between 1855 and 1864. Dadd also produced many shipping scenes and landscapes during his incarceration, such as the ethereal 1861 watercolor Port Stragglin.
After 20 years at Bethlem, in July of 1864, perhaps because Bedlam was overcrowded, Dadd was moved to a new lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, outside London.
Which condition he suffered from is unclear, but it is usually understood to be a form of schizophrenia.
Legacy
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, was to become the title of a song by the rock band Queen. Oliver Knussen considered naming his piece Flourish with Fireworks after The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, as its composition owes a lot to the small, exquisite, quirky details in the painting and contains a similar attempted correlation of large and small scale. The Wee Free Men, a novel by Terry Pratchett, edited in 2003, was in a central part inspired by The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke. Pratchett's friend Neil Gaiman includes a reference to Dadd in The Sandman (DC Comics Modern Age).
In 1980 a long-lost watercolor by Dadd, The Artist's Halt in the Desert, turned up on the BBC TV programme "Antiques Roadshow". Made while the artist was incarcerated, it is based on sketches made during his tour of the Middle East, and shows his party encamped by the Dead Sea, with Dadd at the far right.
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