Richard Dadd was born in Chatham, Kent, on August 1, 1817. As a child, Richard attended The King's School at Rochester, where he developed a taste for classics and Shakespeare that stayed with him throughout his life. Although little of his work from this period survives, Allderidge has him sketching seriously at 13. His father was a carver and bronzeworker and Richard Dadd may have received informal tutorials from some of his father's associates before he applied and was admitted to the Royal Academy in December of 1837 at age 20.
At the Academy, Dadd became friends with John Phillip, who was subsequently to marry Richard's sister Mary Elizabeth, and William Powell Frith (1819-1909), who was subsequently to play a significant role in Victorian genre painting and contemporary scene painting. Later, this circle was expanded to include Augustus Egg, Harry Nelson O'Neill, Alfred Elmore, Edward Matthew Ward, Thomas Joy and William Bell Scott. This group was, in one form or another, known as the Clique in contemporary artistic circles, and frequently met in Dadd's rooms in Great Queen Street.
While at the Academy, Dadd won three silver medals for draughtmanship, and began exhibiting during his first year at the Academy, in the British Artists' Association. During 1840 and 1841, he began to work on Shakespeare illustrations in earnest, and in 1842, he exhibited a version of one of his greatest early works, "Come Unto These Yellow Sands" at the Royal Academy Exhibit.
That same year, he received a commission to provide illustrations for Samuel Carter Hall's "Book of British Ballads", which he executed on woodblocks. At roughly the same time, he undertook to decorate the interior of 26 Grosvenor Square for Lord Foley with scenes from Tasso and Byron.
In July of 1842, Richard accompanied his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, on an extended Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. They crossed from Dover to Ostend on July 16, and within the first month had visited the Rhine Valley, Lake Maggiore, the Bernese Alps, Venice (where Dadd spent time studying Veronese and Tintoretto), Bologna and Alcone. From Alcona, the two sailed via Corfu to Patras and on to Athens. From Athens, they visited Smyrna and Constantinople, returning to Smyrna in late September of 1842. There, Phillips received a brief from the British ambassador to Turkey to visit the Castle of St. Peter in Bodrum, which he and Dadd did, apparently with a view to beginning negotiations for the purchase of the marbles from the tomb of Mausolus there.
From Bodrum, Dadd and Phillips moved on to Lycia in Asia Minor, and then to Rhodes, Cyprus and Beirut. From Beirut, they travelled by mule and foot to Tripoli and Damascus, followed by a swift tour of Holy Land sites that left them, exhausted, in Jerusalem, in early November of 1842. After an excursion to the Dead Sea, the two traveled by boat up the Nile valley to Thebes, arriving there just before Christmas. During this period of the trip, Dadd began to experience headaches and "sun stroke."
Dadd and Phillips traveled back down the Nile to Alexandria at the end of December. From Alexandria, the two men sailed to Malta and then on to the west coast of Italy, where Dadd began suffering from various kinds of more or less paranoid delusions of pursuit, and became increasingly violent toward Phillips. In Rome, Dadd experienced an incontrollable urge to attack the Pope during one of his public appearances, and by the time the two reached Paris in April or May of 1843, Dadd's symptoms became so acute that Phillips was no longer able to explain Dadd's behavior as exhaustion or sunstroke. Dadd left Phillips in Paris in late May, and returned to London.
Dadd was suffering, we are now told, from a manic-depressive or bipolar disorder. It seems obvious from the self-descriptions that have come down to us from the period just before and after the murder of his father that the precipitating event in Dadd's mental life occured in Egypt, probably in the Nile Valley, when he first encountered images of Osiris. His descriptions of being prompted by voices are entirely consistent with other roughly contemporary accounts of psychosis and indeed with the Victorian pattern of psychoses involved divine election/questing of the sufferer.
Essentially, Dadd had become convinced that he was being called upon by divine forces (usually Osiris) to do battle with the Devil, who could assume any shape he desired and was incarnate all around him. Plagued by this fixation, Dadd continued working and living in Newman Street, where he subsisted largely on hard-boiled eggs and ale. Dadd's brother George was at this time also showing signs of mental illness, and Richard's father, although maintaining publicly that nothing was wrong with Richard, had Alexander Sutherland of St. Luke's Hospital examine Richard: Sutherland concluded that Dadd was non compos mentis.
In spite of this diagnosis, Robert Dadd accompanied Richard on a trip to Cobham on August 28, 1843, during which Richard had promised to "disburden his mind" to his father. The two traveled down to Cobham, ate dinner in a local inn, and then walked out into the countryside. At about 11:00 PM, near a chalk pit called the Paddock Hole, Dadd attacked his father with a knife and razor, and killed him.
Richard left Cobham immediately after killing his father, heading to Dover, where he boarded a ship for Calais.
Robert Dadd's body was discovered on Tuesday morning, and the police were called in. There is some indication that they feared Richard Dadd dead as well: they searched for Richard in the Cobham area. When Richard's brother arrived at the crime scene, he immediately assumed Richard had killed his father, and Richard's description was sent to the Metropolitan Police. Dadd's rooms in Newman Street where searched, and the eggs and ale fetish was discovered, along with sketches of Richard's friends and associates, each with a slashed throat.
Meanwhile, Richard had been detained in Calais by the douaniere, released and left to change his bloodstained clothes in an inn in Calais. From Calais, he travelled to Paris, during which trip he attempted to cut the throat of a fellow traveler. He was taken into custody in Montereau, where he identified himself as Richard Dadd and confessed that he had murdered his father. From Montereau, he was moved to the Clermont asylum at Fontainebleau, where a search revealed a list of people "who must die": his father's name was at the top of the list.
Dadd remained in Clermont until late July of 1844, when he was returned to England for a hearing in Rochester. Dadd pled guilty and was sentenced to removal "to a place of permanent safety wothout coming to trial". Dadd's twenty-seventh birthday had just passed.
That place was Bethlem Hospital's crimimal lunatic department: the hospital that gave bedlam its origin and resonance. Dadd was to remain in Bethlem Hospital until July of 1864: a period just under 20 years. Here he did his most remarkable work, including "The Fair Feller's Master-Stroke", "Contradiction: Oberon and Titania", and "Portrait of a Young Man". William Michael Rossetti, the brother of Pre-Raphaelite founder Dante Gabriel Rossetti, visited Bethlem during this period and recorded his impressions of Dadd at this time:
'I saw the ill-starred painter who was sitting with two or three others in a large airy room, having beside him a mug of beer or some other refreshment. His aspect was in no way impressive or peculiar, he seemed perfectly composed, but with an undercurrent of sullenness'.
In July of 1864, perhaps because Bedlam was overcrowded, Dadd was moved to a new lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, outside London. Here he remained, painting constantly and receiving infrequent visitors until January 7, 1886, when Richard Dadd died, "from an extensive disease of the lungs."
His other works include subjects from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Tempest", and recollections of the Middle East, portraits and fairies.
