Richard Dadd 1817-1886

D.P. Clifford;
Anonymous sale Sotheby’s, London, 7 April 1965, lot 78;
J.S. Steward, 1973;
Anonymous Sotheby’s, London, 22 November 1983, lot 44;

Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, on loan 1975-83

David Greysmith, Richard Dadd, New York, 1973, pp.88 and 185, illustrated pl. 108 (reversed);
Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, 1974, p.141, no.236.

This appears to be one of the series of imaginary landscapes that Dadd drew in the early 1860s as an inmate of the criminal lunatic asylum at Bethlem Hospital, where he had been placed following the murder of his father in 1843.

In 1852 Dr William Charles Hood was appointed as physician superintendent at Bethlem, immediately inaugurating reforms in the treatment of patients and improvements to the building to make conditions more pleasant. He took a particular interest in Dadd, recognising his technical skills and extraordinary imagination as an artist, providing him with working materials, and encouraging him to work by acquiring works from him. Hood described his patient as ‘a very sensible and agreeable companion, and [one who could] shew in conversation a mind once well educated and thoroughly informed in all the particulars of his profession in which he still shines …’ (quoted, Allderidge, op. cit., p.30). Hood's kindness towards Dadd, and the practical assistance that he gave during the long years of incarceration, permitted various of the most remarkable works of art by any painter of the nineteenth century to be made.

Among the works painted by Dadd at Bethlem were the extraordinary works of fantasy of which Contradiction – Oberon and Titania (private collection) and The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (Tate Gallery) are the most famous.

Castles and rocky crags of the type seen in the present watercolour occur on several occasions in the artist’s work as a landscapist, for example in the drawing entitled Port Stragglin (British Museum), of 1861. As Patricia Allderidge has pointed out, such a prominent motif may be intended as a symbol of his own isolation in an impregnable fortress (see op. cit., p.119). At the same time, the topography shown must have derived from Dadd's memories of places visited in his earlier life, perhaps mountain scenery seen in Switzerland in 1842 in the course of the journey he made as part of the party of Sir Thomas Phillips and which travelled on to Egypt and Palestine. The river or estuary that runs across the composition may have been prompted by Dadd’s memory of the Thames Estuary at Chatham, where he had lived as a child.