Nick Richardson: At the Royal Academy

Nick Richardson

‘The Flight out of Egypt’ (1849-50).

Richard Dadd ’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, a highlight of the retrospective at the Royal Academy (until 25 October), seems reluctant to give up its secrets. The lighting is crepuscular; tall grass stems stripe the foreground; veined, juicy-looking leaves curtain off the top-right corner. The eye is caught at first by pale daisies that stud the darkness. But peer closely through the dusk and foliage and a crowd of figures appears. Most prominent is the Fairy Feller, in a brown coat and hat with his back turned to us, holding a hatchet aloft. Dadd took the idea for the painting from Mercutio’s description in Romeo and Juliet of Queen Mab, who seeds the minds of sleepers with dreams. The Fairy Feller in Dadd’s painting is chopping hazelnuts for ‘the fairies’ coachmakers’, who will use them to make Mab a new chariot.

There are onlookers: blue-faced people, half the size of the feller, in exotic hats; a cross-eyed old man with a bulbous glinting forehead; a close-bearded soldier and his lutenist companion. Further up the painting, Queen Mab, with green, bat-like wings, gazes at her king. In the top-left corner a trio of brass musicians, two men and a grasshopper, blow into their instruments. Keep looking and more figures emerge from the murk: minute fairies processing along twigs, some winged, some unclothed, some with half-animal bodies; still others hide in the picture’s shaded crevices. The viewer is lured in, deeper and deeper, through layers of intricate detail.

Dadd began painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke in 1855 at Bethlem Hospital in Southwark, where he had been admitted twelve years earlier, at the age of 26, after stabbing his father to death. He stopped painting it in 1864 when he was transferred to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, where he died in 1886. It’s unclear whether he considered the work finished or not.

The Royal Academy’s captivating exhibition, subtitled ‘Beyond Bedlam’, sets out to show that there is more to Dadd than the mad artist away with the fairies. It tells his story in detail, clarifying the nature of his illness and its origins (if he were around today he would be diagnosed as schizophrenic), and illuminates the ways in which his condition and confinement were reflected in his work. Had he not been an inmate of Bedlam then Broadmoor, isolated from other artists and the pressures of the market and contemporary taste, he would have been, perhaps, a Pre-Raphaelite, like some of his peers. Instead, he pursued his own course, developing a visionary style laden with mysterious personal symbolism and private jokes. Portrait of a Young Man (1853) provides a good example of his obscure humour: Dadd places an abnormally large plant directly behind the sitter’s head, so that it looms over him like an attacking triffid. We can’t know why, but we can hear Dadd chuckling to himself.

Dadd had been a rising star of the art scene in London. He won a place at the Royal Academy in 1837, aged twenty, and was a member of a group of ambitious young artists known as the Clique. A portrait by Dadd of a fellow member of the group, Augustus Egg, dressed in the uniform of a Puritan soldier in the English Civil War, is displayed alongside other accomplished portraits from this period. He had some early success with sales and commissions, specialising in paintings with a literary theme. One of these, the Scene from Hamlet of 1840, depicts a pallid Hamlet taken aback in shock, as the ghost of his father appears to him through the shadows; Ophelia, beside him on a divan, clasps her hands in worry.

In 1841 Dadd caused a stir with the exhibition of two fairy paintings inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Puck and Titania Sleeping. Puck is depicted as a naked baby, small enough to be seated comfortably on a mushroom, but large enough to dwarf the fairies that dance around him. The naked dancers are also there in Titania Sleeping, one of Dadd’s most successful paintings, but they’re in the background, off to one side. The focus is on Titania, who sleeps on a luminous bed of white silk surrounded by three members of her entourage, while behind her lurks Oberon, so shrouded in shadow, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, that he is hardly visible at all.

‘Titania Sleeping’ (1841).Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Paris, Department of Paintings.© GrandPalaisRmn (Musée du Louvre) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

Fairies were not a novel subject for painters. The Irish artist Daniel Maclise had shown in his Disenchantment of Bottom (1832) that they provided an opportunity for flamboyant experimentation with figures at different scales. But there is freshness in Dadd’s representation of the fairies in Titania Sleeping. The tiny, mischievous figures that frolic in an arch around Titania’s bower seem like trespassers from another painting, possibly one of Bosch’s raucous scenes. They leer at the classical beauties with bulging eyes and distended noses, blowing on curved horns and cornets in their attempt to wake Titania from her sleep. It is tempting to read more than we should into these noisome invaders. Do they reflect a mind already aware of unwelcome guests at its periphery?

Dadd’s father, a gilder, was well connected with the London artistic community. He was a friend of the Orientalist landscape painter David Roberts, who toured Egypt and the Middle East in 1838. The paintings Roberts worked up from sketches made on the trip were exhibited at the RA in 1840 and much acclaimed. It was Roberts who, in 1842, recommended Dadd to Thomas Phillips, a Welsh lawyer who was setting out on an ambitious expedition taking in Constantinople and the Turkish coast in addition to the sites visited by Roberts. Dadd was to be Phillips’s artist companion, his expenses paid in return for watercolour sketches that he was to make en route and develop into paintings when they got back to London.

Dadd found the expedition arduous and stressful. The pair were constantly on the move, spending many hours each day in the saddle, often in belting heat. Though there were ‘a thousand things to arrest the attention’, Dadd wrote to Roberts, they ‘all seemed to slip away from me as if unreal … pageants of a dream, rather than a substantial reality’. By the time the travellers reached Italy on their way home, Dadd was clearly unwell. Phillips reported that he had delusions of persecution, ‘thinking himself the object of special attention’ and believing ‘attempts were made to injure his health.’ In Rome, Dadd ‘evinced excitement and violence of expression whenever religion, government or the condition of the people was the subject of conversation … contrasting unfavourably the results of Christianity with those of Paganism’. Dadd had apparently taken against Phillips, and in Paris they parted ways.

Dadd made his own way back to London, where he became a recluse, living on raw eggs and ale. His father consulted a psychiatrist, who seems to have recommended treatment at home. We know from Phillips’s letters that Dadd’s father thought his condition was improving, and that Phillips breakfasted with Dadd in July 1843 and believed he had ‘escaped the danger which had threatened his mind’. The following month, Dadd killed his father with a knife in Cobham Park. He fled to France, where he attacked another passenger on the coach to Marseille. He was taken to an asylum in Clermont-de-l’Oise, where he told the doctors that he was a child of the Sun and that he had been chosen to assassinate his father, who was a devil. He was extradited to England, where he appeared before the magistrates of Rochester in July 1844. They initiated the process to have Dadd placed in permanent custody, without trial, as a criminal lunatic. He was sent to Bethlem. A few years later, Dadd wrote an account of the killing of his father. His conviction that he was descended from the Egyptian god Osiris, combined with other ‘secret admonitions’, had induced him to ‘put a period to the existence of him whom I had always regarded as a parent, but whom the secret admonishings I had, counselled me was the author of the ruin of my race … Now the author of this act is unknown to me, although, as being the cat’s paw, I am held responsible.’

Dadd took his sketchbooks from the trip with Phillips to Bethlem and used them as source material for much of the art he made in confinement. The most remarkable painting derived from the sketches is a large, almost square canvas, more than a metre wide, that Dadd worked on from 1849 to 1850. In some ways it is the antithesis of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. The viewer’s first impression is of an explosion of bright colour. A huge crowd of people is gathered at an oasis in the middle of the desert, a landscape so drenched in sunlight that the figures cast no shadows. Dadd did not give this painting a title, but at some point it acquired one, The Flight out of Egypt, a subject that Roberts had painted in 1829.

A bearded man in a headscarf who might be Moses can be seen instructing the vanguard of his band to halt; behind them countless others snake into the distance along a mountain pass. But in the dead centre of the canvas is the raised base of a silver jug. The jug is held in both hands by a man wearing the armour of a Roman centurion with a leopard skin around his neck. His face is obscured by the silver disc. Directly behind his head, like the triffid in Portrait of a Young Man, is a palm tree that spreads its leaves along the painting’s upper edge. Roman centurions did not exist until at least a thousand years after the flight of the Israelites is supposed to have taken place. This is not the only anachronism on display. Around the water spring at the base of the painting are figures whose clothing resembles that of the Arab men and women Dadd would have encountered on his travels. Beside a Bedouin encampment women dance in the flowing dresses worn, according to 19th-century pictorial convention, in ancient Greece. A young boy whispers to a blind old man with a white beard: Homer? The Flight out of Egypt is a collage of ideas, a pageant of dreams, for which Dadd’s sketchbooks were but one source among many.

Despite the hundreds of figures that inhabit The Flight out of Egypt, an eerie silence pervades it. There is little sense of movement; the characters seem frozen in time. You can follow the eyes of people in the crowd. No one looks towards their companion, but at another point in the picture. Though the characters interact with one another as forms, they do not interact as human beings. The Grecian women dance, seemingly oblivious to the presence of those around them. The Fairy Feller also has this peculiar quality of silence; its figures are unmoving, unspeaking, locked in watchful anticipation. In this it is unlike the fairy paintings that preceded Dadd’s psychotic break: there is a strong sense of sound and motion in his depiction of the fairy dancers and blaring sprites in Titania Sleeping.

The curator of the exhibition, Nicholas Tromans, comments on the strange silence of Dadd’s paintings in his catalogue essay, noting that when Dadd’s figures do interact on a non-superficial level, those characters tend to be identical to one another (Royal Academy, £30). In Gaming (1853), for example, one of a series of watercolours illustrating the perils of the ‘Passions’, five men are shown playing cards around a table: two of them are arguing; a third puts a hand on the shoulder of one of the arguers and offers advice; a fourth man appears to be tipping off the other arguer about the card in his opponent’s hand. All five men are identical, with the same hair and beard and only slight variations in dress. In Juvenile Members of the Yacht Club (1853), a sailor holding a model boat stands by his friend, who is clearly the same man. In Robin Hood (1852), one Robin Hood nocks an arrow, while an identical Robin Hood holds back the hound. Tromans suggests that this quirk of Dadd’s painting reflects his mental and social isolation. In an update to Dadd’s Bethlem file from 1860 his physician notes: ‘He associates very little with other patients, but is generally civil and well behaved to them. His mind is full of delusions.’ It seems likely that this aloofness belied a loud and disputatious interior that was more real to him than the society of human beings.

The art of mad artists, inevitably, represents their madness. We can’t help but read it into every surprising decision the artist has made. An element of decryption enters into our engagement with the work. What did it mean to Dadd, who saw himself as an agent of Osiris the Sun god, to paint The Flight out of Egypt, which is so filled with sunlight? What did it mean to paint a perfect shining circle with a tree coming out of it at the painting’s centre? In The Artist’s Halt in the Desert, a man stands at some distance from a campfire, next to a horse and a long spear. Directly above the spear, like a pickled onion on a cocktail stick, is the Moon. It looks like a visual joke, but what did it mean to an agent of Osiris to have spear-stabbed the Moon? Dadd’s art pulls us into his world, but not far enough for it to make complete sense. There are symbols everywhere, but there’s no backbeat.

The final room of the exhibition contains the paintings Dadd made at Broadmoor, which are lighter, more delicate, less crowded than his Bethlem paintings. Wandering Musicians from 1878, one of the last pictures Dadd made, depicts three musicians in folk costume: a man, a woman and a young boy, who stand on a Grecian hillside underneath a ruined temple. The woman does not play her guitar, nor the man his oboe; the musicians stand together but seem unaware of one another; each gazes off in a different direction. Engraved in stone in the bottom right-hand corner is the face of the old, blind, bearded man. (Him again – why?) The musicians are like painted statues whose colour is fading, but the plants that grow up through the cracks in the stone are in motion. A breeze wafts the grasses and ferns; bramble tendrils are creeping down the hillside. The eye is lured away from the painting’s centre towards the secret world that whispers in the green shadows. I found myself scrutinising the foliage, but the fairies failed to materialise.

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