Richard Dadd

Henry Farrer (1821-1906), of Green Hammerton Hall, Yorkshire, by whom purchased at the Royal Society of British Artists, 1841;
Major Thomas Birchall, of Ribbleton Hall, Preston, by 1857, and thence by family descent;
John Rickett, 1964;
J. S. Maas and Co, London, where bought by Sir David Scott, 2 December 1975 for £11,500.

London, Society of British Artists, 1841, no. 603;
Manchester, Art Treasures Exhibition, 1857, no. 335 (lent by Thomas Birchall);
London, Tate Gallery; Hull, Ferens Art Gallery; Wolverhampton, Municipal Art Gallery; Bristol, City Art Gallery, The Late Richard Dadd 1817-1886, 1974-75, no. 58;
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland, Sunshine and Shadow - The David Scott Collection of Victorian Paintings, 1991, no. 4;
Vienna, Kunstforum, Kunst und Wahn, 1997;
Japan, Saitama Museum of Modern Art and Ashikaga Museum of Art, Fairy Painting in Britain, 2003-2004, no. 13;
On loan to Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 2007 to 2008

Art Union, 1841;
John Rickett, 'Richard Dadd, Bethlem and Broadmoor', in Ivory Hammer, The Year at Sotheby's, II, London, 1964, p. 23;
David Greysmith, Richard Dadd - The Rock and Castle of Seclusion, New York, 1973, p. 169, reproduced as plate 24;
Patricia Allderidge, Richard Dadd, London, 1974, p. 98, colour plate VIII;
Victorian Fairy Painting, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London, p. 97;
Christopher Wood, Fairies and Victorian Art, London, 2000, p. 74;
Andrew Clayton-Payne, Richard Dadd (1817-1886), Dreams of Fancy, 2008, reproduced p. 19;
Sotheby's, Pictures from the Collection of Sir David and Lady Scott, 2008, pp. 102-105;

ENGRAVED:
W.M. Lizars, published in Art Journal, 1864, facing p. 130 (by permission of Major Birchall), and Virtue's Imperial Shakespeare, 1873-6.

The following condition report has been provided by Hamish Dewar, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. STRUCTURAL CONDITION The artist's canvas has been lined and this is providing a stable and secure structural support. There is a T-shaped area of repair in the dark shadows in the upper right of the background. The vertical line is approximately 7 cm in length and the horizontal approximately 5.5 cm in length. This repair has been successfully stabilised but is still quite visible in a strong light. I would be confident that should the present lining canvas be removed, and the original canvas treated and relined, that the area of damage could be more successfully repaired and disguised. PAINT SURFACE The paint surface has a reasonably even varnish layer. The area of repair mentioned above has obviously been retouched. The only other retouchings visible under ultra-violet light are both in the outer spandrels and are: 1) a thin diagonal line (approximately 5 cm in length) in the lower right of the spandrel, and 2) small retouchings in the upper right of the spandrel. There are some areas of slight paint separation, which is very characteristic of the artist. The most significant of these are: 1) in the pale pigments either side of "Puck", and 2) in the grey pigments of the clouds in the upper right. SUMMARY The painting is therefore in stable condition but does have one area of repair in the upper right which could be significantly reduced should the canvas be relined and the paint surface treated. It should be stressed however that no further work is required for reasons of conservation. Hamish Dewar Ltd, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London SW1Y 6BU Tel: +44 (0)20 7930 4004 Fax: +44 (0)20 7930 4100 Email: hamish@hamishdewar.co.uk
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

'Painted by Dadd before he was put in Bedlam. He had a 'thing' about Midsummer Night's Dream and there are paintings by him of Oberon and Titania. I was immediately attracted to it when I saw it in Maas' gallery. It was privately owned and had never been in a sale and was in the Dadd exhibition. I was particularly struck by the figures in the spandrels with their Renaissance associations [...] I am glad to have it on my walls.' Sir David Scott

This is one of two fairy subjects painted by Richard Dadd in 1841, which together mark his first interest in the particular genre. Both Puck and its companion piece, Titania Sleeping (Fig 1. Musée du Louvre, Paris), take their subjects from A Mid-summer Night's Dream. Titania Sleeping represents a specific moment in the play – that when Titania is sung to sleep by her attendants in Act II, scene 2. Puck, by contrast, evokes the play in a more abstract way. Superb draughtsmanship, a powerful poetic imagination, an intense love of nature, and a mastery of dramatic lighting characterise all the artist's fairy paintings, and perhaps particularly so Puck.

Among the circle of young artists of which Dadd was part, which group was usually referred to as the Clique and of which William Powell Frith, John Phillip, Augustus Egg and Henry Nelson O'Neil were fellow members, he was one of the most intellectual and widely read in classical as well as English literature. Dadd's first Shakespearean subject, which shows a stage performance of the ghost scene from Hamlet and in which the figures of Charles and Ellen Kean may clearly be recognised, was exhibited in 1840, and seems to imply that he had actually seen the plays on stage as well as having carefully read them. His immediate interest in A Mid-summer Night's Dream, in the nineteenth century Shakespeare's most popular play, may have been prompted by a spectacular staging by Madame Vestris at Covent Garden in 1840, in which production much of the original text was restored after a century and a half of barely recognisable 'adaptations'. The pictorial treatment in both of Dadd's Dream paintings was, however, entirely personal and thoughtful. The symbolical imagery represents a meditation on the play itself, which makes constant reference to moonlight and moon imagery. Dadd too uses the moon to magical effect, placing it as the source of light behind the figure of Puck and leaving the foreground mysteriously shrouded in shadow, with a back-lit border of foliage and sparkling dewdrops framing the front of the composition like a proscenium arch. Beyond the darkness Puck, encircled by dancing fairies on a grassy stage, is picked out by the cool moonlight, emphasising the theatrical nature of the scene: but it is also a view into a miniature landscape inhabited by elementals who are more akin to classical nymphs and dryads than the elves and pixies of many of the artists who followed in this genre. If the childlike figure of Puck at the centre seems slightly incongruous in this company, a sheet of pencil sketches (Fig 2. sold in these rooms, 24 November 1977, lot 74) shows that he was originally intended to hold a bow in his left hand, suggesting that Dadd wished him to be seen also as Cupid, the true presiding genius of the play. 

Royal Academy schools in 1841, and very receptive to and interested in the way earlier artists had treated Shakespearean subjects, and indeed prepared to adapt his compositions from unrelated subjects. Titania Sleeping reveals a debt to Giorgione's Adoration of the Shepherds, then at Bywell in Northumberland but famous from engravings, while Puck is strongly influenced by Sir Joshua Reynolds's treatment of the subject which was familiar from Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Puck, the mischievous sprite, is shown as a naked child, seated on a mushroom and surrounded by his fairy attendants, who dance to him as a chain of male and female figures. The circular composition is cleverly adapted to the subject, with the figure of Puck at the centre and with the moon directly behind him so that its light appears to shine from him. The shadows cast by the dancing figures splay out across the grassy foreground, while their figures appear to complete a circular shape which echoes the overall format. Above Puck's head leaves and flowers, dripping with dew and reflecting the light of the moon, form a kind of proscenium arch, so that the events witnessed appear quite logically to be those seen on a stage and as part of a theatrical performance. Never again did the artist achieve such a limpid quality of sparkling light, or such inventiveness of composition. Outside the perimeter of the tondo format within which is placed the main composition, are decorative spandrels with figurative devices influenced by Michelangelo's sleeping figures in the Sistine ceiling.

Dadd gave way to insanity in 1843, perhaps as a consequence of sun-stroke that he had suffered during a visit that he made to the Middle East in the party of Sir Thomas Phillips. He murdered his father, and was subsequently imprisoned in Bethlem Hospital and later at Broadmoor. He continued to paint, and was even encouraged to do so by his humane and enlightened prison governors. However, the work that he did while incarcerated in the asylums – of which the two paintings Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (Lord Lloyd-Webber collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (Tate) are the most famous examples – was entirely unknown to a wider public. It was therefore on the basis of these two earlier fairy paintings, shown at the Royal Academy (in the case of Titania Sleeping) and the Society of British Artists (the present painting), in 1841, and then seen at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857, that some wider knowledge of his earlier work was maintained. It is interesting that Puck was published as an engraving, appearing in the pages of the Art Journal in 1864, at a time when very few people would have remembered the artist.

Puck belonged first to Henry Farrer, and then from 1849 to Thomas Birchall. Virtually untraced for more than a century, it re-surfaced in 1964 when it was acquired by John Rickett, then a director of Sotheby's, who wrote an important article, 'Rd Dadd, Bethlem and Broadmoor', about the artist that same year.