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.
Richard Dadd trained at the Royal Academy Schools and was establishing himself as a painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes when a journey across the Eastern Mediterranean in the early 1840s preceded the delusions that led him to kill his father. He spent the rest of his life a patient at Bethlem and Broadmoor, and painted there, from memory and legend, some of the most precisely rendered works in British art. The Academy shows them in the Sackler Wing to Sunday 25 October 2026. Tickets are £15 and Friends go free. The exhibition returns Dadd to the institution that taught him, which had no category for what he did afterwards.