As for Dadd…
Do make time to do an images search of Dadd. I think those were the most extraordinarily detailed watercolours I’ve ever seen. And delicate. In fact, many of them were faded to unrecognizability. The gallery they hung them in was kept very dark for that reason, but it didn’t help making out the teeny, tiny details.
In his youth, Dadd was recognized by the Academy as an up and coming artist. He spent some years touring the Middle East painting for an English patron. At the age of 26, his family realized the cheese had slid off his cracker and brought him home to ‘rest’. Shortly after, he decided his father was the devil, cut the man’s throat and fled abroad. He was quickly caught and brought home, to spend the rest of his life in asylums for the criminally insane. Where he had lots and lots of time to paint and play the violin.
He was probably a paranoid schizophrenic, but they didn’t have such a diagnosis in those days. He never repented of his father’s killing, but considered himself an agent of Osiris making a proper sacrifice.
In connection with this show, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind has put his medical records on display through November. Which is a little shocking to the modern sensibilities, but privacy laws don’t apply to the dead, particularly when they shuffled off 140 years ago.
Posted: October 14th, 2026 under personal.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Uncle AL
Time: October 14, 2026, 7:34 pm
Stoaty, regarding those anti-spam efforts — the following suggestion represents a huge number of opportunities for a display of ignorance. Be advised.
It seems likely that whatever else these bots do, it must scan the page text for key character strings to know where to go to post the stinkin’ spam. I wonder if a simple edit of the templates you use might sidetrack the bots.
Ex. 1 — Change “Comments:” to something else for home page article list. Maybe even something as simple/stupid as “Kommentz:” or “stnemmoC:”
Ex. 2 — Change “Name: (as if I cared)” and the strings for E-mail:, Website:, and “Man, I can’t believe…”
Ex. 3 — Change that “Submit” button to say “Tag You’re It” or some other dumb thing.
If this is a straightforward text edit job, it might be worth a try. And if it doesn’t work it should be simple to change things back to the way they were.
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: October 14, 2026, 10:02 pm
Paint and play violin… that sounds suspiciously like the non-detective life of Sherlock Holmes although Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admitted that Holmes was based primarily on Joseph Bell, a professor at the medical school, Edinborough Uni.
The first story featuring Holmes was published late in 1886 and Richard Dadd died in January of 1886. The timeline fits with regard to what Doyle might have known about Dadd and how he might have applied that to the eccentric, violinist cokehead Holmes.
Comment from ExpressoBold Pureblood
Time: October 14, 2026, 10:05 pm
Edinburgh: I meant to check it before I submitted the comment.
Comment from aelf
Time: October 15, 2026, 1:13 am
A part of Terry Pratchett’s “The Wee Free Men” was based on Dadd’s ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’.
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Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny