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.
October 14, 2026 — 6:02 pm
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