Richard Dadd – The Artist and the Asylum

Description

The most brilliant young artist of his generation, Richard Dadd (1817 – 1886) made his name with a sequence of minutely executed fairy paintings of huge imaginative power. Following a long tour of the Middle East in the early 1840s he succumbed to a psychotic illness, murdered his father, and fled to France where he was apprehended. Dadd spent over forty years in Britain’s most famous lunatic asylums, Bethlem Hospital and Broadmoor, never ceasing to work as an artist.

With the public appetite for Dadd’s bewitching paintings never greater, this first full account of Dadd’s life and career provides a vivid account of one of the most fascinating artists of the Victorian era as well as new insights into the troubled relationship between art and madness in the nineteenth century.