Review of the Week: Richard Dadd - Beyond Bedlam at the RA

Royal Academy of Arts, London W1, until 25 October

If you’ve heard of Richard Dadd, it’s probably due to one of two things: a tragic biographical detail or his best-known painting. The tragedy is Dadd’s murder of his father in 1843; the picture is Tate’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), a burst of rustic fantasy painted in Bethlem psychiatric hospital after the patricide, once owned by the poet Siegfried Sassoon and later the subject of a song of the same name by Queen (refrain: “Fairy dandy tickling the fancy of his lady friend”).

A student of the Royal Academy, Dadd was fleetingly celebrated in art circles before he developed what is now widely thought to be schizophrenia. As a journal shown in the Royal Academy’s new exhibition tells us, he became “an artist still living, though long dead to the world” after the murder, confined first to Bethlem and then to Broadmoor until his death aged 68 in 1886. He was rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s (hence Freddie Mercury et al’s homage) but the Royal Academy’s survey is the first since then. 

Shown in the upstairs Sackler Galleries, it is a medium-scale exhibition, with a chronological sweep: it represents Dadd’s full career, but his output was inevitably variable due to his health and incarceration. The show’s pitch is clear: Dadd deserves a more rounded reputation, more things to remember him by. And while it is never less than fascinating, I’m not convinced Dadd emerges as more than a brilliantly talented minor artist.

The first evidence of his outstanding technical gifts are in two paintings featuring scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After Dadd’s accomplished but modest student watercolours and oils, Puck and Titania Sleeping (both 1841) provide an astonishing jolt, reflecting a teeming, fecund imagination, made flesh with extraordinary skill. Puck, naked and pudgy, sits, with an impish grin, on a pedestal while tiny, cavorting, also naked, figures dance in a circle beneath him. Creeping leaves frame the scene, and a flower from one of their tendrils hangs directly above Puck’s head. This is the first of several visual gags – Dadd jokes, if you will – through the show. In theory, Puck is lit from behind by a crescent moon, but the flower above his head surely evokes an early gaslight lampshade or chandelier, perhaps a reference to stage lighting. Dewdrops form a glistening fringe around the flower’s edge, to emphasise the point. 

These little bubbles might be Dadd’s most abiding visual tic; they effervesce across the surface of several paintings, not least Titania Sleeping, where they form the fairy queen’s tiara. She sleeps, attended to by her nymphs, beneath a bower formed by a tumbling encrusted filigree of horn-blowing imps and ghouls. More cavorting figures complete the scene, which is framed by a painted border of gilded hanging bats. How you respond to this turbocharged whimsy will probably reflect the extent of your enjoyment of this show. For all Dadd’s technical prowess, I find it close to unbearable.

It was some relief, then, to encounter the drawings Dadd made on a trip to the eastern Mediterranean as the artist-companion of Thomas Phillips, a lawyer. Apparently, the itinerary was so punishing that Dadd barely found time to stop and sketch, but the moments he was able to put pencil to sketchbook reveal a fine and sure descriptive line, depicting landscapes, architecture, animals and people (often on the same sheet) with marvellous precision and atmosphere. 

Less stirring, indeed almost laughable today in their absurdity, are his orientalist portraits of Phillips in exoticising Turkish and Arabic dress. The problematic stereotypes continue in The Flight Out of Egypt (1849-50), a Bethlem picture, with its prominent racist caricature of a Black man – acknowledged by the curators, to their credit. Among Dadd’s most ambitious paintings, it is partly based on biblical stories, and again brims with figures and incident (and, yes, bubbles). But for all the painterly flair Dadd brings to the individual elements, the composition is awkwardly episodic, even fractured, in contrast to truly great multifigure scenes by the likes of, say, Bosch or Bruegel. 

Also in Bethlem, Dadd made distinctive portraits of doctors and superintendents, including two oils with a vividness close to hallucination (it is difficult to avoid seeing his work through the prism of his illness). But it is the fantasy pictures painted there, again informed by Shakespeare, that are the main event. I will never cease to be mystified by the Victorians’ – or indeed any age’s – fascination with fairies, but Dadd does at least rid his two greatest Bethlem fantasies of the queasy, kitschy excesses of his earlier 1841 pictures. In Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-58), he captures the couple’s dispute over a “little changeling boy” that prompts an environmental collapse, which he describes in withering and greyed, if still densely abundant, flora. Every millimetre of this oval canvas is active, including near-microscopic fantasy frolics around the main scene. 

The Fairy Feller deserves its reputation as the definitive expression of Dadd’s overflowing imagination. Unlike The Flight, the clusters of figures, however isolated, seem to enhance the thronging composition. It helps that Dadd seems less focused on illustrating the source of the title – Mercutio’s Queen Mab passage in Romeo and Juliet – and more on what he called the “pure fancy” of the images in his mind. But what I admire most is Dadd’s chutzpah in making us work to see the action: the blades and inflorescences of grass faintly obscure our view, so it is as if we peer in on this scene from undergrowth, witnesses to the fantastical action.

After this predictable highpoint, the show rather pales for the last two sections. This is partly because watercolour becomes his most frequent medium, but also because of the nature of his subjects and approach, often closer to illustration than to more ambitious art. His 1864 move to Broadmoor, in open Berkshire countryside, was undoubtedly positive for his life, and he depicts the surrounding bucolic landscapes as well as remembered landscapes from earlier in his life. And while moments of brilliance and glimpses of that rich imagination do appear in his late pictures, the overall effect is subdued and calm, possibly relating to the fact that Dadd’s delusions had stabilised. So the show ends more with a whimper than a bang – perhaps reflecting circumstances that were positive for Dadd’s life, if less so for the progress of his art.

Ben Luke is an art historian, critic and broadcaster. He hosts the podcasts A brush with... and The Week in Art and is a contributing editor at the Art Newspaper