
English Victorian Romantic painter Richard Dadd (1817-1886) created obsessively detailed fairy paintings during forty-two years of confinement in psychiatric hospitals after killing his father. Born in Chatham, Kent, Dadd showed early talent and entered the Royal Academy Schools at seventeen, winning the medal for life drawing in 1840. He co-founded The Clique, an avant-garde group preferring genre painting to academic art, and was considered its leading talent. In 1842, he joined an expedition through the Mediterranean and Middle East as official artist, but the journey triggered a mental breakdown. After seeing impressions of the Egyptian god Osiris in Cairo, Dadd became paranoid, believing himself tasked with fighting the devil.
In August 1843, convinced his father was the devil in disguise, Dadd stabbed him to death and fled to France, where he was captured after attempting to kill another traveler. He spent the rest of his life in Bethlem (Bedlam) and later Broadmoor psychiatric hospitals, probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Remarkably, doctors encouraged his painting, even helping him obtain supplies. His asylum works, including The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (1855-1864) at Tate Britain, display extraordinary miniaturist detail and hallucinatory intensity. This painting inspired Freddie Mercury's Queen song of the same name. Dadd's fairy subjects connect to Victorian literary fascination with nature spirits while his technique anticipates Outsider Art. The Bethlem Royal Hospital Museum holds substantial works, and his 1846 portrait of Dr. Alexander Morison hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
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