The Royal Academy shows Richard Dadd, the Victorian painter who made his most exacting work inside Bethlem and Broadmoor, in the Sackler Wing to 25 October 2026.
The Royal Academy of Arts, where Richard Dadd trained, shows the Victorian painter in the Sackler Wing, Mayfair, from Saturday 25 July to Sunday 25 October 2026. He made his most detailed pictures inside Bethlem and Broadmoor.
Dadd was born in Chatham, Kent, in 1817, the son of a chemist. He entered the Academy Schools at 20 and founded The Clique with William Powell Frith and Augustus Egg.
He was painting Shakespearean fairy scenes when a patron chose him in 1842 as draughtsman for an expedition through Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt. On the Nile that December, he became delusional and believed he was under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris.
By the following August he was convinced his father was the Devil. He killed him and was arrested in France after attacking a fellow passenger.
Dadd was committed to Bethlem, then to Broadmoor, where doctors encouraged him to keep painting. He probably had paranoid schizophrenia, as two of his siblings did.
More than a hundred works hang here. The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, worked on from 1855 to 1864, gave Queen a song title, and his 1852 portrait of a doctor hangs with it.