LONDON.- The Royal Academy of Arts presents a survey of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd (1817–1886). The exhibition is the first major retrospective devoted to Dadd in over 50 years, bringing together around 100 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings. Organised according to the key phases of the artist’s life, it explores his early years in London as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, his travels, and the final 42 years of his life as a patient in Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals.

Best known for his fairy scenes drawn from Shakespearean subjects, Dadd’s paintings are distinguished by their extraordinary intricacy and imaginative intensity. Recognised early for his remarkable skill at rendering detail, he was invited in 1842 on an ambitious tour across the Eastern Mediterranean that would shape the course of his life and work. The experience had a profound influence on his artistic imagination, but the itinerary was rushed and Dadd began experiencing delusions during the long journey. On his return to England, he killed his father, believing his true father to be the Egyptian God Osiris, and fled to France where he was apprehended. He spent the remaining four decades of his life in hospitals – first at Clermont north of Paris (1843–44), then at Bethlem in Lambeth (1844–64) and finally at Broadmoor in Berkshire (1864–86). During this time, he continued to work from memory, imagination and earlier sketches. His art was appreciated for its originality in his own lifetime and has continued to inspire many artists, writers and musicians, such as Cornelia Parker, Angela Carter and Queen, whose song ‘The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke’ was directly inspired by Dadd’s painting of the same name.

The show begins with Dadd’s time as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Dadd made his name by exhibiting the extraordinary fairy painting Titania Sleeping (Musée du Louvre, Paris) at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1841, marking a breakthrough moment when he was recognised for his distinctive style. Puck, 1841 (The Harris, Preston) and Scene from Hamlet, 1840 (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) also reveal his early mastery of elaborate detail and evocation of the uncanny. This display is followed by a gallery dedicated to Dadd’s tour around the Eastern Mediterranean. This space includes pages from his surviving sketchbook and a selection of watercolours, which capture the people, architecture and landscapes he encountered with exceptional observational detail.

The subsequent two galleries focus on the body of work Dadd produced at Bethlem and Broadmoor Hospitals. At Bethlem, he returned to the Shakespearean fairy subjects of his youth, and produced some of his most celebrated works, including Contradiction. Oberon and Titania, 1854–58 (Private Collection) and The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855–64 (Tate). Other works created during this period were influenced by literature, legends and memories, ranging from meticulously remembered landscapes to entirely imagined scenes. He also painted portraits of hospital staff who became important supporters and patrons, as seen in works such as Portrait of a Young Man, 1853 (Tate), and contributed to hospital life by making designs for the Broadmoor theatre and prize certificates for staff.

Throughout his life, Dadd continued to make works of technical brilliance and fascinating originality, showing a dedication to keeping alive his memory, his imagination and his profession. Together, these works reveal a painter of singular vision whose intricate and inventive works continue to captivate audiences today.