22.08.2026
Named ‘Beyond Bedlam’, the irony of this exhibition is that the most interesting works from Dadd actually date from the Bedlam period. A period when Dadd really becomes Dadd. Before, he had technical accomplishment and hard work. After, he became an interesting painter and artist. Perhaps this shift and renewal or remaking is reflected in the infamous deed that Dadd did, which was to kill his father during a psychotic outbreak. ‘Dad’ was a word used to refer to the father in Victorian times, so perhaps Dadd killing his father was a killing of himself. A self destruction and self making.
The background to the parricide was that Dadd had been exploring Syria and Egypt, or the Orient and had then become overwhelmed with the sights he had seen. One speculates that he was overcome by the Orient, by difference from the West. Traumatically so. He began to believe that he was the god Osiris, with the over-identification with the East. This trauma of the imagery of the East and of difference would inform his works when he was confined to mental institutions for the rest of his life. So, perhaps one should see Dadd’s works as the traumatic exploration of being different, of being other to the West.
An interesting painting in this regard is ‘Contradiction’, which is about Oberon and Titania fighting over the Indian boy in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, when the East inspires conflict and overturns the order of nature, as in Shakespeare’s play. The Indian boy seems to be pulling Oberon into nature and its world. Elsewhere, in the Bethlem period and beyond, nature similarly seems to be overtaking the male characters and their portraits too. Portrait of a Young Man, 1853 is enmeshed in nature, as are the figures in Bacchanalian Scene, 1862.
Why does madness make the art of Dadd interesting? Why does difference impose such a trauma on this Western artist? Why are we, the public, in love with the artist’s madness? Is any of us really beyond Bedlam?
diary of a lone man 