Richard Dadd: an artist whose extraordinary vision was not blocked by his 43 years in security | Art and design

MeIn late 1843, the famous Art-Union magazine mourned the death of “the late Richard Dadd”, a kind and gentle man who for a year or so was a scholar at the Royal Academy of London. Today, Father is known, if at all, because he killed his father in the midst of severe psychosis, who gave him to the protection of the Bethlem hospital where he spent the remaining 43 years. As Art-Union concluded: “Even if the grave is not closed on him, he must be among the dead.”

In Bethlehem, Father started painting again. Memoirs of his travels around the Eastern Mediterranean – during which he began to suffer from depression – were followed by allegories, plays, biblical scenes and detailed fiction, among them The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which he never finished. he painted between 1855 and 1864. Meanwhile he was more patient than painter, and the prism of mental illness through which his work began to be understood has not changed.

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam at the Royal Academy is the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in more than 50 years. Returning him to his alma mater puts the emphasis on Dadd the artist, and in the same spirit his medical records will be left at the exhibition, his illness and crime briefly mentioned. Freed from the story of the asylum, Dadd’s work can be seen as coherent, explains co-curator Sylvie Broussine: “The story before and after is short: the style changes, but this happens with many artists in different situations.

Broussine points to Father’s long-lasting interest in Shakespeare, whose stories he made highly imaginative, consistent with his original idea of ​​a mastery of the speculative arts. If the Father’s escape to the world of fairy tales sounds like a sign of detachment from reality, the image in the exhibition, Titania Sleeping, shown at the RA in 1841, illustrated by The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, shows that such a reading is easy.

Jennifer Higgie, the author of Bedlam, a book published to accompany the exhibition admits the fact: “But his language grew – you can not look at The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke without noticing some madness in the way he painted it – in the most difficult and detailed look.” Bedlam is the latest in a long line of productions inspired by Adad, which includes Angela Carter’s 1979 television drama. Come to these Yellow Sandsis a 1974 single by Queen The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. The urge to enter Daddy’s mind is apparently irresistible.

No one has thought longer and harder about this than Nicholas Tromans, leading man and co-host of the show. When Adad first came to prominence in the mid-1900s, he was seen more as a medical researcher than as an artist, as part of a higher belief that art was a useful tool in diagnosis. Tromans distanced himself from this now-maligned approach in the introduction to his 2011 book Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, in which he wrote: “I didn’t just write about JMW Turner or Claude Monet, I pretended to know what they were thinking and feeling when making their pictures”.

And yet, he said: “I like to say that the characters in his characters don’t get along, his figures don’t talk to each other, look at each other or say anything.” It is impossible not to see how we know what we know about him, which was that he was very circumcised and did not like to talk to other people very much.

Andrea Mindel, member of Bethlem Artist Collective (BAC), from Bethlehem Galleryin a hospital room in London, he worries that the father’s illness makes the artist useless, and makes many people think about mental illness: “It’s good that you’re back, but you have to explain it to yourself. ‘this is a difficult conversation’.”

Perhaps it is in recognition of this tension that in preparation for the exhibition, the RA engaged a stakeholder group consisting of three members of the BAC including Mindel to explain his writings. Other goals include signing up for NHS support and providing a quiet place to think. If such measures seem to be too much in our time, that must be a good thing: doing Adad’s exhibition has a big meaning for the way mental illness is made, and it will help to improve the reception of the work by today’s experts.

Karim Sultan is in charge of exhibitions and art development at Bethlem Gallery which works with artists many of whom suffer from mental illness. He emphasizes the “flattening effect” that the building promotes as a public exhibition space: “No one is sure who they are until people start talking to each other. At the end of the day, if you come into the space and you work as an artist, then that’s who you are”.