Richard Dadd (1817-1886) is often viewed as a curiosity as much as a painter. Because he stabbed his father to death, supposedly obeying the voice of God or Osiris he heard in his head, and spent some 40 years in first Bethlem and then Broadmoor asylums for the insane, his paintings are seen as the expressions of a deranged mind as much as fully fledged works of art. Dadd, however, had received a classical training at the Royal Academy Schools and while his madness could overrule his wits it couldn't obliterate his skill.The Watts Gallery near Guildford is holding a small but choice exhibition of this unique painter's work. The former home of G.F. Watts is an appropriate setting, since the two men were born in the same year and the gallery bequeathed by the Victorian grandee is suitably eccentric. There are about 25 works on show – a handful of oils and the majority in watercolour – and they all display Dadd's obsession with detail and his breath-taking technique with the thinnest of brushes: this is not an exhibition for the hard of sight.The pictures he painted while incarcerated offer an understandably strange mixture of themes. Some are recollections of a trip around Greece and the Holy Land he made with his patron Thomas Phillips (including a beautiful nocturnal scene, “Halt in the Desert,” c1845, that was rediscovered on the Antiques Roadshow television program); there is the bewilderingly detailed “The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke” that developed from the Shakespearean pictures he made before his madness; there is an unnerving portrait that probably portrays Charles Hood, Bethlem's Physician-Superintendent, in which the sitter is in danger of becoming entwined in the vegetation of the garden in which he sits; there are landscapes both real (a microscopic depiction of barren Rhodes) and imaginary (towering mythological cliffs); and a series of haunting and deeply personal pictures illustrating the passions.They all share the same intensity of vision, as if Dadd were intent of depicting the essential nature of things, whether that be emotion, the fairy world, or the motes that make up the physical world. That intensity makes them undoubtedly bizarre pictures that are nevertheless thrilling to look at. The inspiration behind them may have been unhinged (although Dadd was mentally stable for long periods in Broadmoor) but these are no mere curiosities. Even in his madness he remained an artist.
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