Richard Dadd’s 'Portrait of a Young Man' to Return to Bethlem 170 Years Later
By Heloise Pinto
Portrait of a Young Man, 1853, by Richard Dadd, will soon return to the institution at which it was created to be shown in a new exhibition called ‘The Faces We Present’ at Bethlem Royal Hospital’s current location in Beckenham.
Richard Dadd, Portrait of a Young Man, 1853. Oil on canvas. Image: Tate
The exhibition has been created in collaboration with South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust’s Lived Experience Network, and the loan of Portrait of a Young Man from the Tate has been facilitated by the Weston Loan Programme, which is the first UK-wide funding scheme aimed at helping smaller, regional museums to borrow artefacts from national collections.
Richard Dadd was born in 1817 and brought up in Chatham, Kent, before moving to London at the age of seventeen to pursue a painting career. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and enjoyed some success as a painter in the first part of his career. In 1842, however, he embarked on a tour of Italy, Greece, Palestine and Egypt – as the official artist of his gentleman patron Sir Thomas Phillips – but returned quite altered. He had begun suffering from increasingly frequent delusions, believing, for example, that he was able to communicate with ancient Egyptian gods. It is now held that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. One such episode led him, after his return to Britain, to murder his father, believing him to have been possessed by the devil. Dadd fled to France but was soon arrested there and sent to Bethlem Hospital, where he remained for the next twenty years.
Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64. Oil on canvas. Image: Tate.
Doctors' reports from his time there explain that Dadd was, in himself, consistently ‘incoherent and deluded’, but retained his desire and ability to paint and was therefore provided with equipment and a workspace. He was thus able to continue producing works of art, among them the pieces of astounding intricacy, singularity of style and fantastical theme for which he has been subsequently recognised. Perhaps most well-known is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke of 1855-64, painted for H.G. Haydon, who worked at Bethlem. Dadd’s nine years of unfinished work on this piece are evident in the inexhaustible detail occupying every part of its tiny composition. Its narrative has puzzled viewers; all the figures, except Oberon and Titania, are products of Dadd’s imagination, including, unnervingly, a representation of his father.
Portrait of a Young Man was also painted at Bethlem. The subject – thought either to be a fellow patient or Dr William Charles Hood, physician-superintendent at Bethlem who encouraged Dadd’s painting – slumps despondently against a bench made of entwined branches in the hospital garden, his expression impenetrable. The atmosphere of melancholy solitude is skilfully evoked in a strangely captivating way; Dadd’s warm tones and mellow and delicate natural forms make the scene almost inviting. Given the circumstances of its creation, this unsettling response adds to the picture’s intrigue.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones once described Dadd’s long confinement – until his death at Broadmoor in 1886 – as an exceptional freedom from ‘Victorian pedantry’ which allowed the artist to paint simply from his own vision, into which viewers of ‘The Faces We Present’ will be able to glimpse – uniquely combining the effects of his early induction into the Victorian fervour for fairy painting and a subsequent artistic empty space filled by his imagination alone. Although induced by personal tragedy, Dadd’s dislocation from the mainstream artistic activity of his day produced artwork entirely worthy of the refreshed attention it is sure to receive next month.
Bibliography
Emily Snow. ‘The Fantastical Fairy Paintings of Richard Dadd’. The Collector. December 2021. https://www.thecollector.com/richard-dadd-victorian-painter/
Harriet Sherwood. ‘Victorian Portrait Painted at Bethlem Hospital by Patient To Go On Show’. The Guardian. January 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jan/02/victorian-portrait-painted-at-bethlem-hospital-to-go-on-show-in-same-building
Jonathan Jones. ‘Locked Up in Bedlam, Artist Richard Dadd Was Set Free by Fairies’. The Guardian. June 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/jun/17/richard-dadd-victorian-artist-bedlam-mental-illness-fairies
Nina Allan. ‘Richard Dadd and the Magical Genre of Victorian Fairy Painting’. Art UK. June 2021. https://artuk.org/discover/stories/richard-dadd-and-the-magical-genre-of-victorian-fairy-painting
‘The Faces We Present’. Bethlem Museum of the Mind. https://museumofthemind.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/the-faces-we-present
‘Portrait of a Young Man’. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dadd-portrait-of-a-young-man-t06665
‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke'. Art UK. https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-fairy-fellers-master-stroke-117744/search/actor:dadd-richard-18171886/page/1/view_as/grid