Comment by Richard Dadd – could his mental illness help explain these shocking images? | | Art and design

TThe boy in the garden must be one of Richard Dadd’s fellow patients at Bedlam, you think. His disheveled hair and disheveled clothes are sure signs of a disturbed mind as he sits, half his face in shadow, hands nervously clasped, on a well-knotted wooden bench surrounded by greenery too green for comfort. However, the subject of the 1853 Portrait of Father is probably the superintendent of Bethlem Hospital, Dr Charles Hood. The artist sees his thoughts in the hospital of a young man who seems to be weak. The patient and the doctor are not so different, he says. There is a very fine line between “madness” and “insanity”.

Dad crossed that line when he killed his father who he thought was the devil, and then tried to kill a stranger as he fled to Paris. He was quickly caught and spent the rest of his life in Bedlam and Broadmoor. But how does his mental illness explain his captivating, surprising, sometimes unforgettable images? Is he some kind of Victorian acid victim whose visions of fairies are the strange fruit of his psychosis?

The A limited survey of the Fathers of the Royal Academy it’s called Beyond Bedlam and it encourages us to see him as a “crazy” artist. Yes, he spent more than 40 years in mental hospitals where he was judged to be incurable and where he painted his masterpiece The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which greatly enhanced this corner of the English garden. But he was already a wonderful artist, with fairies as his famous subject.

These are not Disneyfied beauties but mystical creatures from British mythology, evil and destructive, as seen by Shakespeare. The original Puck’s Dad cartoon features an evil sprite known as a giant baby that is illuminated by moonlight. In Titania is Sleepingwe see, through the bat’s parting cloth, the female genitalia. It’s a story for grown-ups. And so it is River of Fairies How is a magical woman – or is she a naked woman? – stares at us in a row of trees painted in the red darkness of the British landscape.

Dad then traveled to the Middle East, filling his sketchbook with mosques, markets, and Egyptian ruins, but what could have been an inspiring escape turned him into a depressed and homicidal maniac. This is when a life of trust opened up.

When the fairies return to him in Bedlam they part violently. His early work is abstract but vivid with romantic artists like Fuselage and Runge. But no example helps to understand The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Painted over a period of nine years, it breaks the rules of portraiture that my father taught me. When you try to understand, your eyes have to look between long black grass, green flowers, leaves that block your vision and block the image. Only in this article can you describe in detail the group of magical people. The little creatures gather in wonder and awe to see the mighty fairy raise an ax to “fall” into a horse chestnut to fix Queen Mab’s coach. These fairies are not cute or charming. Two have large legs sticking out of their pleated skirts. One has a big blue head.

It’s a picture full of emotion and not in any way fun or fantasy fiction. This is what these exhibits look like, says Dadd, presenting us as examples of history viewed through a microscope.

Perhaps he volunteered to show Dr Hood such fairies in Bedlam’s garden retreat.

You can’t get away from it. Dad was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great artist himself – and a modern artist. In his own way he breaks the rules of art, bringing new realities that Manet and Whistler explore, outside the “intellectual” world. The strange thing is that inside the refuge they see nature in a new way. Freed from artistic convention, he paints flowers, fruits, and weeds with the brutality of their reality. In Bacchanalian SceneHappy, bright faces appear in the scary bushes.

RA insists in vain to show some unpleasant work, as if to prove that not everything he did in Bedlam was accused of “insane” intelligence. But when he was transferred to the new Broadmoor Hospital his passion for nature reignited. From the best fruits to the simulated mountain harbor he created for the hospital’s walls, these slow-moving watercolors are so beautiful, so sad.

You can’t escape the fate of a talented artist who spent most of his life incarcerated, even in more generous settings than our imaginations of Victorian asylums would lead you to expect. But Father will not be converted as historians long to be a famous scholar who was in Bedlam and Broadmoor. Thank you Titania. Although his life was miserable, he cut grass to see what others could not see: small dangerous things in the grass, happy parties in the evening fields. Shine, you crazy Victorian.