The first years of Richard Dadd’s life promised the conventional success of a highly talented British artist. The young Dadd was a student of the Royal Academy Schools and founding member of a group of artist-friends known as the Clique. In the early 1840s Dadd was already establishing himself as a painter of Shakespearean fairy scenes when he embarked on an ambitious trip across the Eastern Mediterranean that would inspire him for the rest of his life. On his return to Britain, Dadd began experiencing delusions, which led to him killing his father.

Dadd spent the rest of his life as a patient in Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals, where he was encouraged to continue producing oil paintings and watercolours of extraordinary delicacy and vividness. Despite Dadd’s seclusion in the Victorian asylum system, he was able to draw upon his memory, imagination and abiding interest in literature and legends to render fantastical worlds replete with exquisite detail. These paintings and watercolours are among the most original and imaginative works in British art.

Dadd’s art was all but forgotten until it resurfaced in the 1960s and 70s. In the years since, his work has continued to inspire artists, writers and musicians, including the band Queen, who named a song after one of Dadd’s most celebrated paintings, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Bringing together more than 100 works, this exhibition tells the story of Dadd’s life and art, as radical and imaginative in his time as it is today.

Our Friends preview days take place 23 July, 10am–6pm, and 24 July, 10am–9pm.

Special thanks to Bethlem Museum of the Mind, Victoria and Albert Museum and Yale Center for British Art for their generous support of this exhibition.