There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd.
The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886.
The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these portraits are included in the exhibition, among them Dadd’s portrait of Augustus Egg dressed as a Parliamentarian soldier from the English Civil War.
These works are magical and delicate, yet dark like all great Victorian things are
It was also during this time that Dadd developed his lifelong fascination with fairies. He returned again and again to Shakespeare: Puck, the mischievous trickster from A Midsummer Night's Dream; Titania, its fairy queen, lulled to sleep by attendants whose noses become tiny trumpets; and countless other sprites and mythical creatures. These works are magical and delicate, yet dark like all great Victorian things are, crammed with naughty faces and gossamer dresses, dew drops trembling from snowdrops that seem willing to spill beyond the canvas and trickle along the magnificent frames.
In 1842, Dadd accompanied the Welsh lawyer Sir Thomas Phillips on a tour of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. With photography still in its infancy, artists like Dadd served as visual chroniclers, recording the ancient remains of Egypt, the temples of Greece, and the people and places they encountered along the way. Many of the sketches from that journey are displayed in vitrines throughout the exhibition. Yet it was during these travels that Dadd’s mental health began to deteriorate, ultimately leading to his institutionalisation.
Beyond Bedlam rescues Dadd from the shadow of that notorious institution, showing instead how memory and imagination sustained a lifetime of painting. Memories of the craggy cliffs of Rhodes reappear in one luminous landscape; ‘Reminiscence of Venice’ returns to sketches made during his 1842 travels; and the choppy waters near his childhood home in the naval town of Chatham are painstakingly recreated in the seascapes of the final room. Together, these works remind us that, although Dadd’s body was confined, his imagination never was.
