”Richard Dadd was born in 1817. He began drawing when he was about thirteen, and he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1837. He began exhibiting his work in the same year, and soon began to make a reputation. He was considered to be one of the most promising young artists of his generation, and was also known for his gentleness and good nature.
At the age of twenty-five he was employed to travel with Sir Thomas Phillips through Europe and the Middle East, and make drawings of the places they visited.
Towards the end of the ten-month journey he developed symptoms of severe mental disturbance. By the time he reached home he was suffering from paranoid delusions. On 28 August 1843 he stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Rochester in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise.
Dadd fled to France and was arrested after trying to cut the throat of a stranger in a coach. He spent ten months in a French asylum before being brought back to England. In 1844 he was committed to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum which was then attached to Bethlem Hospital. For many years he was unpredictable and occasionally violent. He never completely lost his delusions. In 1864 he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Asylum, which was built to replace the criminal wings at Bethlem. He died there in 1886.
Dadd continued to paint throughout his forty-two years of confinement in Bethlem and Broadmoor. His most famous works are The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), on display at Tate Britain and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58), in the Lloyd-Webber collection.”
Texten ovan kommer från Bethlem Royal Hospital
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