On the 28th of August 1843, the painter Richard Dadd stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Rochester in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise. A recent tour of the Eastern Mediterranean, popular among educated and artistic young men who wanted to explore the ‘exotic’ away from the parochialism of England, had had a profound effect on his imagination, but during the demanding itinerary Dadd began to experience delusions.
On his return to England, he believed that the instruction to kill came from his true father, the Egyptian God, Osiris. Immediately after the murder, he fled to France, where he intended to go on a killing spree but was arrested after trying to cut the throat of a fellow traveller with whom he was sharing a coach. After ten months incarcerated in a French asylum, he was extradited to England and sent to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum attached to Bethlem Hospital, suffering paranoid delusions. Unpredictable and often violent, he was then transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Asylum in Berkshire, where, later, he died of consumption.
This first major retrospective of his work in over 50 years brings together around 100 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings that include sketchbooks and watercolours detailing the people, architecture and landscape of his Eastern Mediterranean tour.
In the late 19th century, madness was viewed through the lens of scientific objectivity, moral anxiety and social control. It had shifted from the brutal treatment of earlier eras when ‘lunatics’ were chained and their discombobulated behaviour considered entertainment for the toffs who came to gawp at them. The Victorians saw mental illness as needing ‘moral management’. This carried the eugenic-tinged fear of degeneration, the belief that ‘madness’ was a condition that could be inherited, thereby threatening the moral fibre of the British Empire. Asylums were structured to mimic traditional Victorian households where the superintendent acted as a firm but ‘benevolent’ father. Wealthier patients were given amusements like reading, writing and, in Dadd’s case, painting to distract them from their distress. Psychological interventions, such as Freud’s talking therapy, were still in their infancy. Though in La Salpệtrière Hospital, Paris, the French physician Charcot was beginning to experiment with hypnosis to alleviate hysteria.
Richard Dadd’s mother had died tragically when he was six, and his father, Robert, moved to Suffolk Street near the National Gallery, where he set up as a gilder to the artists of London, befriending the Orientalist landscape painter David Roberts and making other useful social contacts. In 1841 Richard began his studies at the Royal Academy, becoming an industrious and talented student. The early paintings exhibited here show subjects taken from English history, as well as classical and fashionable literature, painted not only to highlight his academic talents, but to sell.
Dadd, like the Pre-Raphaelites, the early Arts and Crafts movement and poets such as Keats (think La Belle Dame Sans Merci), drew inspiration from the Middle Ages, which was seen as a spiritually and aesthetically purer time. A reaction to the new industrialisation, Medievalism portrayed the ideal not as the polluted city with its belching factories but as a golden past filled with chivalry and feudal order. Fairy mania also gripped Victorian culture, providing psychological solace in a landscape of dark Satanic mills and scientific materialism, and filling the spiritual vacuum left when Darwin’s theories of evolution rocked long-held religious beliefs.
Shakespeare was another rich source for Dadd. He made his name with Titania Sleeping, shown at the Royal Academy first in 1841. Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania lies lulled to sleep by her fairy attendants beneath a bower of entwined goblins and homunculus in pointy hats, playing petal trumpets. This is surrounded by a border of bats with entwined wings. Hidden in the shadows, Oberon prepares the magic flower juice to squeeze onto Titania’s eyelids. At the same time, a trail of toadstools leads to a group of naked Bacchanalian dancers exiting the canvas, stage left. This use of Shakespearean tales and myths gave the Victorians permission to indulge in covert eroticism.
Dadd worked on the Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, painted in Bethlem, for nine years, paying microscopic attention to detail. To give context to the painting, he wrote a long poem, the Elimination of a Picture & its Subject─called The Fellers’ Master Stroke, in which each of the characters is given a name, and there are frequent references to English folklore and Shakespeare in an attempt to show that his intricate work was not just the product of a fevered imagination. In the crowd of tiny Bosch-like figures hidden among giant flowers, berries and a lattice of twigs and blades of grass, is the ‘fairy-feller’, his axe raised to cleave a hazel nut to furnish Queen Mab’s carriage. A patriarchal bearded figure in a gold crown stands nearby ready to tell the axeman to strike. He is surrounded by an intricate tapestry of soldiers, peasants and winged fairies drawn from Dadd’s imagination. In the top right is a pharmacist (the same profession as his murdered father). The effect is obsessive, disturbing and uncanny, as if he is trying to come to terms with his guilt in this allegory of parricide played out in a miniature fairy domain. The painting would ultimately remain unfinished.
Despite his early academic training at the Royal Academy, Richard Dadd can be seen as a precursor to Outsider Art. Confined for a lifetime in Bethlem and Broadmoor, he was freed from the constraints of Victorian society. His intense visionary perspective with its obsessive, miniscule, crowded compositions without any discernible horizon line would influence surrealists and writers like Angela Carter and the LSD inspired graphics of 1960s underground magazines such as Oz, blurring the boundaries between academic painting, pure imagination and psychotic delusion.
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, Royal Academy of Arts, 25 July – 25 October 2026
When she first took to the streets her photographic landscapes, which included Time Square, Coney Island and the street fairs of Little Italy, were similar to those of her predecessors and contemporaries such as Paul Strand and Lee Friedlander. But her photographs, snatched through doorways and shop windows, display a dispassionate voyeurism, rendering her something of an urban anthropologist who objectively observed the strange customs and happenings that she stumbled upon. Through her eyes, the mundane became edgy, whether she was photographing an ample naked woman in a white bathing hat showering on the beach at Coney Island or, what looks like, one of Sweeny Todd’s potential victims through an ordinary barbershop window in 1957 New York. It’s as though she was on a permanent lookout for the odd and the transgressive. As she wrote to a friend in 1960, “I don’t press the shutter. The image does. And it’s like being gently clobbered.”
Her early chance encounters, which resulted in photographs such as Woman in a mink stole and bow shoes, N.Y.C 1960, and the image of a hirsute man in pork pie hat, boxer shorts and black shoes and socks standing on the beach in Coney Island, gave way to photographs such as Jack Dracula at a bar, New London Conn, 1961 in which the heavily tattooed young man sits in front of his glass of beer staring confidently at the viewer. From the ghoulish curiosity shown in a pair of Siamese twins preserved in a glass jar in a New Jersey carnival tent, Arbus’s role as a curious observer changed to one of privileged insider. She claimed: “I have learned to get past the door from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another.” There’s the sense that in The Human Pincushion, Ronald C. Harrion N.J. 1961 – where a middle-aged white man stands pierced with hatpins like some downtown secular Saint Sebastian – or the moustachioed Mexican dwarf striped to the waist beneath his little trilby in his N.Y.C hotel, are complicit in the making of the image. That Arbus’s half of the bargain was to make them visible and feel singled out from the crowd. There’s a strong sense running through all these images – particularly those of the many ‘female impersonators’ – that self-worth comes from being seen and recorded – even if harshly. But it often feels, despite her unerring eye, as though there is not much compassion in these photos. As she said: Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot…There’s a quality of legend about freaks….. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw’.
This wonderful exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, held to mark the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, is part of a yearlong celebration. For the first time, they are showing all 22 paintings, 60 drawings and more than 300 of the finest examples of the Rembrandt’s prints in their collection. It explores different aspects of Rembrandt’s life and works through a variety of themes. The first section is predominantly made up of self-portraits. The second focuses on his surroundings and the people in his life: his mother, his wife Saskia as she lies ill and pregnant in bed, as well as beggars, buskers and vagrants that illustrate Rembrandt had an ability to depict poses and emotional states with great empathy. The last section demonstrates his gifts as a storyteller. Old Testament tales inspired paintings such as the exquisite Isaac and Rebecca, more commonly known as The Jewish Bridge c 1665-1669, a work of such consummate skill in its handling of paint and one imbued with such deep tenderness that it takes the breath away, even after countless viewings.
Above all Rembrandt was interested in people. Not stereotypes or ideas but real living flesh and blood characters. Salacious depictions were hardly unknown in the 17th century, but his etchings of a man and a woman pissing go beyond mere voyeurism into a form of social realism. His wife Saskia is shown in numerous poses. His fluid lines suggest that often he drew directly onto the copper etching plates. He’d cover the plate with a mixture of resin and beeswax, then draw through that surface with a needle to expose the metal. The plate would then be immersed in acid, inked and put through a printing press. One of the most touching is a small etching of his young son, Titus as a 15-year-old, executed in a bare minimum of lines. Titus’s shock of hair and pensive gaze are particularly compelling. Etchings rarely came into being in a single session. In the early years, when still gaining experience, he might begin with the head, move onto the torso and finally add the background. A master of light and dark, he used contrasts to add emotional depth and range.
And what does he want the Summer Exhibition to look like? After all Michael Craig-Martin painted the walls pink. “Well I’m going to have a menagerie. There’s a tradition of animal painting from Stubbs to the more amateur cat paintings traditionally submitted to the RA summer show. Our interest in depicting animals goes back to our first image-making in caves. But the truth is that you don’t know what is going to be submitted and it’s a committee decision. This year’s committee is made up of: Stephen Chambers, Anne Desmet, Hughie O’Donoghue, Spencer de Grey, Timothy Hyman, Barbra Rae, Bob and Roberta Smith, the Wilson twins and Richard Wilson, so it’s quite a cross section.”
There are also ‘portraits’ of Cy Twombly, Mario Merz, Claes Oldenburg, Merce Cunningham and the poet and translator, Michael Hamburger. Stillness and quietness run through these works. In the film about Hamburger, he barely appears at all. We mostly see his gnarled hands turning his collection of apples from his apple orchard in fractured English autumn light, as a poet might turn over single words. You can almost smell the withered musty skins.
She has said that she is interested in objects in the landscape and has included some wonderful paintings of 1814 by Thomas Robert Guest of Bronze Age and Saxon Grave Goods, excavated from a Bell Barrow in Wiltshire.. Her own passion for the painter Paul Nash is underlined by the inclusion of his Event on the Downs of 1934, with its gnarled tree stump and mysterious tennis ball, which has been set between her diptych Ideas for a Sculpture in a Setting, inspired by one of the many flints collected by Henry Moore and kept in his studio. Shot is black and white the object becomes part vertebrae, part talisman, echoing the rock formations and stone henges to be found in this part of the countryside.
And does the work really justify all this space in three public institutions simultaneously? Well, yes and no. Dean is an interesting artist. At her best quietly poetic, as in the painterly The Green Ray, 2001 where we can glimpse, if we are patient, the brief refractive green flash caused by the sun setting over the sea. Here she captures something atavistic, in real time, something sublime that could not be caught on anything other than film. Though her use of light she touches on the history of painting, on the primal and creates a sort of truth.
In Vase of Flowers, 1924, which includes as its centrepiece the green Andalusian glass vase purchased in Granada in the winter of 1910-11, also included in this exhibition, we find a number of Matisse’s favourite motifs: the open window, the sea and sky, a vase of flowers, patterned wallpaper, a striped cloth, and a net curtain flapping like a translucent veil emphasising the boundary between inside and out. The vase not only functions as a ‘souvenir’ of his travels but underpins memories of the Islamic interiors that had so impressed him on his visit to the Alhambra on the same trip. This sublime painting, full of Mediterranean warmth, air, and light, captures the prelapsarian mood created within his studio with its tapestries and paintings, flowers and furniture, such as his favourite Venetian chair that he painted on numerous occasions. But his studio was not only a sort of lost Eden but ‘a working library’ of objects that had an almost anthropomorphic relationship one with the other. “To copy the objects in a still-life is nothing; one must render the emotion they awaken…” he said. The object became an ‘actor’, so that his much-loved silver chocolate pot is alive to its neighbouring objects whose reflections are caught shimmering in its rotund belly. Based on dialogue and connection these objects cannot be seen in isolation but reflect an almost human sympathy one with another. The ‘reality’ is no longer a purely visual one, arrived at by copying. The object has become an emotional vector. As for Freud, Matisse’s objects reflect an inner mental and emotional reality.
During the mid-1930s Matisse’s art underwent a radical transformation, in which drawing played a crucial role. Here the energy seems to flow so that people and things appear to float within abstract space, rendering everything of equal weight and value. This dynamic freedom was further explored within the suggested rectangular grid cut-outs such as Panel with Mask, 1947. As he said in 1951 the cut-out became, “the simplest and most direct way to express myself.” With these flat, bright forms he created a series of signs, dependent not on the recognition of an object but on the emotional charge created through shape and colour.
In another painting from the same decade, In a Hotel Garden (1974) we can virtually feel the fierce midday sun pulsing beyond the suggested window frame, the patches of cool air circulating beneath the abstracted blue and white stripped awning, the filtered shadows penetrating the arched leaves of the palm tree. But Hodgkin isn’t a realistic painter. He doesn’t describe. He immerses himself in a particular time and place to recapture it later in the studio, like Wordsworth recollecting his emotions in tranquillity. In 1967, after several days spent in Delhi with the British Council representative and his wife, he painted Mrs. Acton Delhi (1967-71), possibly his most figurative painting. The odalisque-style figure of Mrs Acton, made up of spheres and curves, reclines languidly on the left hand side of picture space. It was during this period that Hodgkin decided to move from painting on canvas to wood, saying, “I want to be able to attack again and again and again, and the trouble with canvas is that if you attack it more than once or twice, there’s nothing left.”
Staged by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the aim of the original 19th exhibition was to promote technological innovation. This was met by riots from Chartist protestors in Birmingham’s Bullring. Frightened, angry and discombobulated by the rise in these new-fangled technologies, the Luddite riots reflected the uneasy economic split that was beginning to occur between old crafts and new industry. As I looked out of the ‘window’ of the virtual room into the virtual streets, policemen in white trousers were marching back and forth as Chartists with swords, pikes and flaming torches gathered and shouted, throwing eggs at the window. It was hard, during this immersion, to escape the parallels with today’s politics, where increasing unemployment is being generated by new technologies that render numerous jobs obsolescent. That many, today, blame ‘experts’ and the ‘intellectual elite’, seems little different to the emotions motivating the crowd hurling insults at Fox Talbot and his scientific friends ensconced in King Edward’s School.