(b Chatham, England, 1817; d Berkshire, England, 1886) English painter. Dadd enjoyed a brilliant early career, winning three silver medals at the Royal Academy Schools and achieving an effortless distinction among his artistic contemporaries. Beginning to exhibit in 1837, first at Suffolk Street then at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, he revealed a strong inclination towards imaginative painting, concentrating on fairy subjects and gaining a reputation as their leading exponent. In 1842 he was approached by Sir Thomas Phillips, a South Wales solicitor and hero of Chartist riots, to accompany him on a tour of the Middle East. He was recommended by David Roberts, and was expected not only to be a traveling companion, but also to record the architectural sights. The visual excitement and physical hardship of the ten-month Middle-Eastern tour precipitated a crisis. Dadd returned insane, and in August 1843 murdered his father at Cobham. Following the murder, he fled to France, where he attempted another murder and was arrested. Having been extradited to England, he appeared before magistrates at Rochester. His behavior left no doubt of his disturbed state of mind, and on 22 August 1844, almost a year to the day after killing his father, he was committed to Bethlem Hospital. Dadd remained in Bethlem for twenty years, moving in 1864 to the newly built Broadmoor in Berkshire. In 1852 Dr William Charles Hood was appointed as physician superintendent at Bethlem. He took a particular interest in Dadd, provided him with working materials, and encouraged him to work by acquiring works from him. Hood's kindness towards Dadd, and the practical assistance that he gave during the long years of incarceration, permitted some of the most remarkable works of art by any painter of the nineteenth century. A 1974 Tate exhibition rightly set out to show that Dadd was already, before insanity took over, an artist of rare perception, and that insanity should only be regarded as one of the many influences on his work. Two fairy paintings for which he is now best known “Fairy Feller's Master-stroke” and “Contradiction: Oberon and Titania” were completed in the asylum. (Credit: Christie’s, London, The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art, February 19, 2003, lot 228; Sotheby’s, London, Important British Drawings, Watercolours and Portrait Minitures, November 23, 2006, lot 248)
RICHARD DADD (BRITISH 1817-1887) STILL LIFE WITH BOTTLE AND CORKSCREW Oil on boardSigned and dated '1834' (lower right)26 x 20cm (10 x 7¾ in.)Painted circa 1834 - 38.Provenance:Spink & Sons, LondonSale, Christie's, London, 18 November 1966, lot 14 where bought by Maas Gallery, London The collection of Mr John Rickett by 1974 A Private CollectionLiterature:Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, 19 June - 18 August 1974, p.50-51 (ill. p.51, No. 23) Exhibited:London, Tate Gallery, Richard Dadd, 1974, No. 23London, Arts Council of Great Britain, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974-75, No. 23The date on the present lot is unclear, however it has been suggested that it reads '1834'. If this is the case, it would make it the earliest known oil painting by Dadd to survive, dating from the same year that the family moved from London to Chatham. However, Allderidge suggests a later date is more likely, and dates the work to circa 1838.
RICHARD DADD (BRITISH, 1819-1886) The Rabbit Hutch pencil and watercolour on paper 7 1/2 x 5 1/8 in. (19.1 x 13.2 cm.); and A fragment of a letter in an unidentified 19th century hand, referring to Dadd, 2 pages, 8vo (worn)
Richard Dadd (British, 1817-1886) The Haunt of the Fairies oil on canvas, painted oval canvas size 61 x 51cm (24 x 20in); sight size 57 x 47.5 cm (22 7/16 x 18 11/16in). For further information on this lot please visit the Bonhams website
Richard Dadd (1817-1887) Sketch for 'Poverty' signed, inscribed and dated 'Sketch for Poverty by/RICHARD. DADD. 1853 -/Bethlem Hospital. London.' (lower left) pencil and watercolour, on paper 13 ½ x 9 ¾ in. (34.3 x 24.8 cm.)
Autograph letter signed by David Roberts ("David Roberts"), about Richard Dadd and his incipient madness, to the journalist S[amuel] C[arter] Hall, 3 pages, second leaf laid down on an album leaf, 8vo, Fitzroy Square, 20 September 1843
RICHARD DADD 1817-1886 AT BETHLEHEM, NEAR THE GREEK CONVENT OF THE NATIVITY OF CHRIST inscribed l.c.: At Bethlehem near the Greek Convent of the Nativity of Christ. watercolour with bodycolour 19 by 14.2cm.; 7½ by 5¾in.,
Follower of Richard Dadd 1817-1886- "Jerome", a Rifleman in waterproofs, standing full-length; watercolour, titled, 30x23cm: Gariot, act.1866- Figure playing a flute in an extensive landscape; pen and black ink, signed and dated, European School 18/19th century- Classical study; pen and black ink with watercolour wash, on laid paper: together with other 19th century coloured chalk and pen and ink studies by and after various hands: (7) (unframed)
Circle of Richard Dadd 1817-1886- Head of an Eastern gentleman; oil on panel, 17.5x12.2cm. Note: Compare lot 27 Sotheby's sale 21st June 1983 19th Century European Paintings & Drawings "Head of an Eastern gentleman", oil on board, signed, 18x13cm
DADD, Richard (1817-1886). Autograph letter signed to David Roberts, Athens, 4 September 1842, 3 pages, 4to (245 x 200mm) , on a bifolium, light blue paper, the first page cross-written, address panel, seal (slightly discoloured in outer margins, tiny hole in first leaf touching one word, seal tear). One of four recorded letters describing Dadd's travels in Italy, Greece and the Levant in the year before he murdered his father. David Roberts, to whom three of the letters are addressed, had been elected to the Royal Academy the previous year, and on his recommendation Dadd accompanied Sir Thomas Phillips, a solicitor and former mayor of Newport in Wales, to record the journey in sketches. The present letter offers a lengthy and vivid account of his experiences between Venice and Athens, revealing his enthusiasms and prejudices, and state of mind. In Venice, 'the pictures of Paul Veronese and Tintoretto are the most marvellous things imaginable in respect of execution and colour' while the modern exhibition at the Academy is condemned as 'infamous daubs', and in St Mark's, 'one of the most gorgeous temples conceivable [...] the altars are rich to excess and with the lights burning, priests officiating and people kneeling about the place', he gratifyingly recalls Roberts' own work, and continues with comments on paintings and frescoes at Bologna and Ancona to interest his correspondent. Dadd's perceptions of foreigners are generally unflattering, remarking particularly upon their avariciousness, 'The gondoliers are the greatest scamps breathing [...] at the end of the voyage they asked for a gratuity and grinned at their own impudence in doing so [...] there was never anything equal to the assurance with which all foreigners plunder travellers'. Elsewhere they swarm with 'greedy looks and clutching fingers' and his impressions reach a pinnacle of fascination and disgust in Corfu, where surrounded by 'a large assortment of pompous ruffians, splendid savages, grubby finery, wild costume, long matted hair, dark complexions and noisy shopkeepers, all styed in filth', he pulls out his sketchbook, and is 'immediately surrounded by the whole market; I never saw such an assemblage of deliciously villainous faces, they grinned, glowered, and exhibited every variety of curiosity. Oh such expression on such heads! is enough to turn the brain of an Artist'. Scornful of Patras and disappointed by Delphi, he finds Greece 'exquisitely beautiful', but generally 'an unhappy country'. In both Italy and Greece he refers derisively to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox rites. Poignantly in view of the tragedy of the following year, Dadd concludes by asking Roberts to call on his father to tell him that he is well and will write from Smyrna or Constantinople. Dadd returned to England in May 1843, his behaviour by now often bizarre and giving way to the suspicions and paranoid delusions foreshadowed in the present letter. On 28 August 1843 he stabbed his father in Cobham Park, believing that he was the devil. He fled to France but was brought back to England and committed to the Royal Bethlem Hospital, then the state asylum for the criminally insane. In his youth among the most gifted of his circle and popular for his gentle nature and intelligence, he continued to paint in confinement, and the two fairy paintings for which he is now best known ( Fairy Feller's Master-stroke and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania ) were completed in the asylum. One of the sketchbooks meticulously recording his travels is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Richard Dadd (1817-1886) Study of Eastern heads and figures pencil and watercolour heightened with touches of white on grey-blue paper 7¾ x 10¾ in. (19.7 x 27.3 cm.)
THE GARDENER THE GARDENER 20.3 by 30.5 cm., 8 by 12 in. oil on board PROVENANCE George Henry Haydon, Steward of Bethlem Hospital, by whom given to Mr Shields in c.1880; By descent to Arthur E. Shields; J. Bomford (1949); Tom Laughton (to 1964); Sotheby's, London, 18 March 1964, lot 41, where bought by the present owner EXHIBITED London, Leicester Galleries, The Victorian Romantics, 1949, no.65; London, Agnew's, Loan Exhibition: Victorian Painting 1837-87 (in aid of the Victorian Society), 1961, no. 47 as 'The Gardener'; Sheffield City Art Galleries, Victorian Painting, September - November 1968, no. 31 as 'The Gardener'; Kingston upon Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Collectors' Choice, 1970, no. 48; London, Tate Gallery, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974 (later shown under the auspices of the Arts Council at Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Municipal Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; and Bristol City Art Gallery, 1984-5), no.189; London, Arts Council of Great Britain, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974-75, no. 189 LITERATURE Graham Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene, 1953, p.56, repr. fig.16; John Rickett, 'Richard Dadd, Bethlem and Broadmoor', in Ivory Hammer, The Year at Sotheby's, II, 1964, p.27, repr. p.25; David Greysmith, Richard Dadd - The Rock and the Castle of Seclusion, 1973, pp.80, 185, pl. no.105; Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974, cat. no. 189, repr. p.124; Patricia Allderidge, Richard Dadd, 1974, p.101, cat. no. 28, repr. p.39 NOTE Richard Dadd's strange but fascinating work The Gardener shows the family home of the poet Alexander Pope at Binfield, west of Windsor in Berkshire. The part of the house seen in the painting, built in the sixteenth century, had its main entrance in a gabled end and was constructed of typical Berkshire red brick and with a timber frame. Lattice windows with leaded divisions are shown, as well as an ornamental chimney and a brick outhouse. A classical façade of five bays was added early in the eighteenth century. Although having stood for some years in an abandoned state, the house -- now called Pope's Manor -- still stands. Alexander Pope's father was a successful linen-trader, who converted to Roman Catholicism. Because of anti-Catholic feeling, the family moved from the city of London, where his son Alexander had been born in 1688, first to Hammersmith and then, in about 1700 to Binfield. Largely self-educated and suffering a spinal disease that stunted his growth, Alexander Pope remained at Binfield until the age of about twenty-eight. The Berkshire countryside inspired Pope's early poetic work, for example his long Windsor Forest (1713), a poem which combines topographical descriptions with political and historical musings and which reflects his Tory sympathies. It has been suggested that Dadd based his view of the house in The Gardener on an engraved plate in Thomas Dugdale's England and Wales, delineated, the set of eleven volumes of which was published in 1846, although with various adaptations and adjustments of the architectural forms and the overall perspective of the building (see Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, (hereafter referred to as Tate 1974), p.124, for a reproduction of the engraving). However, Dadd departed from the engraving in the treatment of the garden, in which he paid particular attention to details of plants and figures; a gardener is shown carrying a spade and a rake, and with a watering-can and his a dog, and on the right side of the composition an elegantly dressed couple walk among sunflowers, roses and potted plants. Although the figures are represented in contemporary dress, perhaps the importance of the motif of the garden is intended as a reference to Alexander Pope's own love of plants and their cultivation, and his creation of picturesquely ornamented gardens. As Patricia Allderidge pointed out in 1974, the figure of the gardener closely resembles Dadd's father, who the painter himself had murdered in 1843, the event which led to his admittance to an asylum at Clermont. As Allderidge goes on to suggest, there may have been some deliberate intention in placing a figure representing his father in conjunction with sunflowers, as at the time of the patricide Dadd may have become obsessed with images of the sun. The governor of the asylum in Clermont where he was admitted for a period after his flight to France described how Dadd appeared to have no memory of his former life, but would simply stand in the courtyard of the hospital staring at the sun which 'he calls his father' (quoted Allderidge, Tate 1974, p.26). During his lifetime Dadd's mania or monomania (which would probably now be diagnosed as paranoid scizophrenia) was said to have been triggered by a case of sun-stroke suffered during a trip to explore Palestine and Egypt in 1842. Whether any deliberate association or private symbolism invoking the sun and the representation of sunflowers was intended can only be a matter of speculation. Dadd's The Gardener can be dated to the early 1860s, or in any case prior to mid-1864, on the grounds that it must have been painted at Bethlem Hospital in London, because it came into the possession of G.H. Haydon who was Steward there. In about 1880 Haydon gave it to a Mr Shields, whose family business supplied the hospital with furniture. On 23 July 1864 Dadd was transferred to the newly-built Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, which happens coincidentally to be only about five miles from Binfield. A further possibility is that Dadd's representation of the house in which Alexander Pope lived was intended as a tribute to the poet, whose works he may have read in the asylum. Since the early 1850s attempts had been made at the instigation of the hospital's governors to eventually make the lives of the prisoners more pleasant, by providing them with useful activities and intellectual stimulation. These reforms were conducted by Dr William Charles Hood, who was appointed as Resident Physician at Bethlem in 1852. Shortly afterwards a ward of the hospital was dedicated for the use of the 'better class' of patients, where they could enjoy some seclusion. A grant of £100 was made by the government to provide books, and pictures and statues were also introduced. Hood took a particular interest in Dadd, recognising his technical skills and extraordinary imagination as an artist, and describing 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 and would, it is thought, have pre-eminently excelled had circumstances not opposed' (quoted Rickett 1964, p.28). It may have been Thomas Dugdale's books which provided the immediate pictorial inspiration for the present painting, but also perhaps to works of poetry which may have made him want to know more about the setting in which Alexander Pope had led his early life. However Dadd was very well educated and continued to read both classical and English poetry throughout his life, therefore it is possible that Dadd was already aware of Pope's work. The artist William Powell Frith, whom Dadd had known in his student years, was an admirer of Pope's work and painted a scene from his life. The painting is richly coloured, with particular delight taken in the contrast between the blue of the sky, marked with strands of the clouds; the green of the foliage of the tree and garden vegetation; and the reds of the walls. A deliberate and slightly jarring motif is the colour contrast between the purple brown reds of the bricks and the poster red of the woman's cape. All is painted with a close attention to detail, with each quarry of glass in the windows reflecting the light at a slightly different angle, and with variations in the colours of the bricks. Although Dadd can have had no knowledge of the work of contemporary landscape painters such as George Price Boyce, who were then giving comparably close attention to historical and vernacular architecture, he may have seen engraved reproductions or had a memory of earlier painters of landscape and urban subjects, such as for example the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan van der Heyden, whose works were much admired in the mid-nineteenth century and who was famous for his meticulous depiction of brickwork. The Gardener was part of the remarkable collection formed in the post-war years by Tom Laughton. He also owned the extraordinary oval Contradiction: Oberon and Titania. The Gardener was purchased by its present owner, along with Contradiction (subsequently sold, and now in the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber) at Sotheby's in 1964. CSN We are grateful to Patricia Allderidge for her kind assistance with this catalogue entry.
VARIOUS PROPERTIES A CASTLE ON A CLIFF OVERLOOKING A LAKE 38 by 48.5 cm., 15 by 19 ¼ in. watercolour over pencil PROVENANCE 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; EXHIBITED Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, on loan 1975-83 LITERATURE 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. NOTE 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.
A CASTLE ON A CLIFF OVERLOOKING A LAKE 38 by 48.5 cm., 15 by 19 ¼ in. watercolour PROVENANCE D.P. Clifford; Sotheby's, London, 7 April 1965, lot 78; J.S. Steward, 1973; Sotheby's, London, 22 November 1983, lot 44; Private collection EXHIBITED On loan to Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, 1975-83 LITERATURE David Greysmith, Richard Dadd, New York, 1973, pp.88 and 185, reproduced as plate 108 (reversed); Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1974, p.141, catalogue no.236. NOTE This appears to be one of the series of imaginary landscapes that Dadd painted in the early 1860s as an inmate of the criminal lunatic asylum at Bethlem Hospital, where he had been placed following his 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. In 1857 a ward of the hospital was dedicated for the use of the 'better class' of prisoners, where they could enjoy some seclusion. A grant of £100 was made by the government to provide books, and pictures and statues were also introduced. Hood 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. Other works are serene and abstracted, gentle and dreamlike, as if the artist was searching into the inner reaches of his own visionary imagination for images of peacefulness and calm. The range and variety of the different types of work undertaken is in itself indicative of the fluctuations of the artist's mental state. 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. A further possible inspiration for the main elements of the landscape may have been the types of rocky hillside crested with towers and fortifications and often skirted with trees which Dürer introduced to various of his engravings, for example that in the background of Sea Beast and Woman, of 1496 (see Fig.1). Dadd may have had access to reproductions of such prints, or perhaps remembered them from the years before his imprisonment. CSN
Landscape with cattle and a bridge signed, inscribed and dated 'Composition: sketch. Richd Dadd./Bethlem Hospital. London. Mar 7th 1857.' (lower left) watercolour 6 5/8 x 9 3/4 in. (17 x 24.8 cm.)
The Castillian Spring at Delphi, Greece numbered '7.' (lower left) signed 'Richd. Dadd' and with inscription 'DELPHI spring castalian [sic]' (on the reverse) pencil and watercolour 10 1/8 x 7 in. (25.7 x 18 cm.)
Tom O'Shanter happening upon 'warlocks and witches in a dance' with signature and date 'Rd Dadd 1841' (lower right) oil on canvas, unframed 21 3/8 x 24 in. (54.3 x 60.9 cm.)
The Haunt of the Fairies oil on canvas, painted oval 23 7/8 x 20 in. (60.6 x 50.8 cm.) PROVENANCE with Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, 1854-6. William Cox, 57 Pall Mall; Christie's, London, 15 February 1884 (third day), lot 439 (15 gns to Henry John Armstrong, Glasgow). Bought from him in November 1977 by The Fine Art Society, London, from whom acquired by the present owner. LITERATURE C. Haddon, The Fairy Kingdom, London and Sydney, 1998, p. 77, illus. C. Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, 2000, pp. 81-2, illus. p. 80. EXHIBITION Brighton, Brighton Museum, Fairies, 1980, no. D23. 32 Victorian Paintings from the Forbes Magazine Collection, 1981. The Pre-Raphaelites and their Times, 1985, no. 65. London, Royal Academy; Iowa, University of Iowa Museum of Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; and New York, Frick Collection, Victorian Fairy Painting, 1997-8, no. 22. NOTES No Victorian exponent of fairy painting was more remarkable than Richard Dadd. He was less prolific than Noel Paton or J.A. Fitzgerald, the other most considerable talents involved, but his mental disturbance took the genre to a level of intensity which they were unable to touch. To compare their work with his is to experience a vivid illustration of Coleridge's famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Dadd's greatest fairy pictures are the two masterpieces he painted in Bethlem Hospital after going mad and murdering his father in 1843: Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8; private collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64; Tate Gallery). However, in the years immediately preceding his committal, he painted a small group of fairy subjects, of which The Haunt of the Fairies is one. Others are Titania Sleeping (Mus‚e du Louvre, Paris), shown at the Royal Academy in 1841; Puck (private collection), which appeared at the Society of British Artists the same year; and 'Come unto these Yellow Sands' (private collection), exhibited at the RA in 1842. Superficially these paintings appear more conventional than Contradiction or The Fairy Feller, but they too betray a disturbing and slightly sinister quality, eminently suited to their subjects, which seems to anticipate the tragedy of 1842. The menacing canopy of bats' wings which overhangs the action in Titania Sleeping is a good example. A smaller version of The Haunt of the Fairies, entitled Evening, was included in the Richard Dadd Exhibition mounted at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1974, no. 60 (illus. in cat.).
Polyphemus discovered asleep signed, inscribed and dated 'Sketch of/Polyphemus/discovered asleep by the shepherds of/Sicily/Richard Dadd./1852' (lower right, on a rock) pencil and watercolour 101/4 x 14 1/8 in. (26 x 35.8 cm.) PROVENANCE N.G. Ley; Sotheby's, London, 19 November 1970, lot 193, when acquired by the present owner. LITERATURE D. Greysmith, Richard Dadd: The Rock and Castle of Seclusion, London, 1973, pp. 79, 173, pl. 44. P. Allderidge, Richard Dadd, London, 1974, no. 45, pp. 53, 102-103, illus. EXHIBITION Victorian Art, 1972, no. 68. London, Tate Gallery, Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Wolverton, Municipal Art Gallery and Bristol, City Art Gallery, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974-75, no. 107, illus. Princeton Alumni Collections: Works on Paper, 1981. NOTES This watercolour was painted while Richard Dadd was in Bethlem Hospital. Dadd has chosen not to depict the conventional images of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, as a savage monster, being blinded by Odysseus while in a drug-induced sleep or madly pursuing the ships of Odysseus as he escaped. Instead he shows a rather bucolic scene wherein Polyphemus, an old man, having fallen asleep is discovered by Sicilian shepherds, who gaze with wonder at the giant they have stumbled across. Polyphemus appears in Sicilian legend and in the Idylls of Theocritus as a jovial figure and an unsuccessful rival to the shepherd Acis for the love of the nymph Galatea. In the same year as he painted this pastoral scene Dadd also executed the violent Dymphna Martyr and Death of Richard II at Pomfret Castle. Patricia Allderidge notes ( op. cit. ) that perhaps through the lack of available models Dadd has reused a number of compositional motifs and poses which appear in other works. Here Polyphemus' right hand encircles the rock with the same gesture as the dying servant clutching the air in Richard II of the same year and it also appears in The Child's Problem and Splendour and Wealth. The shepherd with outspread arms appears again in The Flight of Medea with Jason and in Arab Ambush, while the hunting horn reappears in Robin Hood (1855). The technique employed is typical of Dadd's works of the 1850s before he replaced the broad washes of colour with the pointillist technique of the 1860s. The delicate tonality of pale blue, pink and yellow anticipates his later work in is medium. Born in Chatham in 1817, Dadd enjoyed a brilliant early career, winning three silver medals at the Royal Academy Schools and achieving an effortless distinction among his artistic contemporaries. Beginning to exhibit in 1837, first at Suffolk Street then at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, he revealed a strong inclination towards imaginative painting, concentrating on fairy subjects and gaining a reputation as their leading exponent. In 1842 he was approached by Sir Thomas Phillips, a South Wales solicitor and hero of Chartist riots, to accompany him on a tour of the Middle East. He was recommended by David Roberts, and was expected not only to be a travelling companion but to record the architectural sights. There was clearly a strong streak of madness in Dadd's family. He was one of seven children, four of whom died insane, including his younger sister Maria Elizabeth, who married the painter John Phillip. In retrospect even his early work sometimes has a manic quality, while his devotion to imaginative subjects seems to strike a warning note in view of what was to follow. In any event, the visual excitement and physical hardship of the ten-month Middle-Eastern tour precipitated a crisis. Dadd returned insane, and in August 1843 murdered his father at Cobham, believing that he was acting as the agent of the Egyptian god Osiris (the tour had included Egypt) who had ordered him to exterminate the devil. Following the murder, he fled to France, where he attempted another murder and was arrested. Having been extradited to England, he appeared before magistrates at Rochester. His behaviour left no doubt of his disturbed state of mind, and on 22 August 1844, almost a year to the day after killing his father, he was committed to Bethlem Hospital. Dadd remained in Bethlem for twenty years, moving in 1864 to the newly built Broadmoor in Berkshire. Dadd is a unique phenomenon in British Art, perhaps in Western art in general. Insane for nearly two thirds of his life, he was able, like a traveller with tales of a fabulous country, to send back reports of his mental terra incognita thanks to the miraculous preservation of his talent under the condition of madness. The 1974 Tate exhibition rightly set out to show that Dadd was already, before insanity took over, an artist of rare perception, and that insanity should only be regarded as one of the many influences on his work. This aim was achieved, and we now know that Dadd's work, at all stages of his career, was never less than interesting and often rose to heights of poetic intensity.
