Fantastic Metropolis

‘So quick bright things come to confusion.’ That line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream might have been written by Shakespeare as an elegy for the life of Richard Dadd. The story of how this shy and gifted young painter turned into the notorious Victorian parricide, who spent half a century confined in institutions for the criminally insane, remains an exemplary tale of the confusion and defeat of human aspiration.

He lived from 1817 to 1888. His father was an apothecary and chemist from Chatham in Kent. In 1837, Richard entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he was a diligent student. The remarkable gentleness of his character was remarked upon by his contemporaries. In 1841, he had his first public success with two paintings, Titania Sleeping and Puck, both visual excursions into themes provided by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dadd seems to have been fascinated to the point of obsession with the Middle Spirits, that region of supernatural beings who are neither angels nor devils, but a mixture like ourselves of good and evil. In Shakespeare’s play they can be experienced by human beings only in dreams, thus acquiring a dream’s intensity but always within a dream’s parenthesis. We wake to another reality.

In portraying this world of enchantment, Dadd was in no way unusual. The Dream was by far the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in the nineteenth century. The recent exhibition of fairy paintings at the Royal Academy displayed the tremendous popularity of that genre, and displayed too how easily it can slide into kitsch. Lachrymose confections, set up to permit the loving delineations of pre-pubescent nudity, with the excuse of a pair of glued-on gossamer wings to introduce the designation ‘fairy,’ can cloy remarkably swiftly. But nothing in Dadd is like that, at least partly because his world of enchantment is always a world of menace at the same time.

In 1842, Dadd left England with Sir Thomas Phillips for a trip which would encompass the Near East. During this expedition Dadd painted many evocative watercolours of places such as Bethlehem—studies which could be mistaken for those of any number of orientalists, in search of distant exoticism, the glamour to be had on the far side of industrialism. Yet even here a caveat should be entered. One of the most famous species of that nineteenth-century orientalism which we have inherited is the seraglio painting, such as those of Ingres. It seems here as though the Levant is a vast harem of langorous bodies, draped in diaphanous veils. Here the pre-industrialism of the Ottoman empire dissolves into lethargic eroticism. This is life as provocative display, in which any activity other than dalliance and delectation appears unthinkable. This is merely the visual equivalent of Napoleon’s Egyptian conquest of 1798.

This was not what Dadd saw, or even pretended to see. Instead his Middle East is filled with people going about their mysterious business. They talk unintelligibly at street corners. This has more to do with the genuinely enquiring orientalism of Edward Lear or David Roberts, and one of the things it surely does is to mark a line of exclusion. If Ingres’ levantine images are appropriative, reducing the human being to luscious decoration, Dadd’s reveal and record a potential danger.

And it was in fact during this trip that Dadd showed the first signs of insanity. He became convinced that he was tormented by devils, and that he was under the sway of the god Osiris. He entertained fantasies of killing Phillips. By the time he returned to England he was obviously in a state of mental incompetence, and on the 28th August he stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Chatham, believing him to be the devil in disguise. Then he fled to France, where he very nearly committed another murder, before being captured, returned to England, certified insane and incarcerated in the male criminal block of the Bethlem Hospital, the institution popularly known as Bedlam.

Dadd seems to have been sympathetically treated during his confinement. He was certainly encouraged to paint, and it was at this time that he produced his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania. It is the former that is most often reproduced, in whole or in part, and it was this picture that started me off on my enquiry. It hangs in the Tate, and the first thing that strikes one is its diminutive size. Having seen so many reproductions, which turn out to have been enlargements, the small-scale actuality comes as a shock. Dadd was a miniaturist. It is an art-form that recommends itself to the vulnerable, since its effects are easily hidden. But if the dimensions are small, the achievement is huge. There is a whole world in this painting, portrayed with the one-hair-brush finesse of a Van Eyck.