Richard Dadd, the asylum painter who fed Queen and Angela Carter, gets a second look

Richard Dadd began work on The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke in 1855, in a single-bed room inside Bethlem Royal Hospital, and did not finish it until 1864, by which point he had been transferred to the new Broadmoor criminal asylum. The canvas, dense with figures the size of a thumbnail and a narrative no scholar has fully cracked, is one of the most obsessively detailed paintings in British art, and it was made, almost entirely, by a man who had been certified insane after stabbing his father to death in 1843.

A new exhibition, opening as Guardian coverage notes this week, is trying to prise Dadd's work loose from the long Victorian habit of treating him as a curiosity, a footnote about a murderer whose art was tolerated because it was harmless. The curators' argument is straightforward: for forty-three years inside two institutions, Dadd kept painting, kept producing portraits, fairy scenes and orientalist fantasies of remarkable finish, and the people who paid attention included the royal family and, a century later, Angela Carter. The art deserves the kind of reading that does not begin and end with the diagnosis.

A painter kept inside

Dadd was admitted to Bethlem in 1844, after killing his father Robert Dadd in the belief that the patriarch was, in Dadd's later account, the Devil. He was a student at the Royal Academy schools, a recent traveller to the Mediterranean and the Middle East with the painter Sir Charles Eastlake, and a painter of obvious promise. The killing ended that life and began another, inside the asylum walls, where he was given materials, a room, and an unusually long leash by Victorian standards. He stayed at Bethlem until 1864, then was transferred with a handful of other "criminal lunatics" to the newly built Broadmoor in Berkshire, where he remained until his death in 1886.

The institutional routine gave him something close to what any working painter needs: time, materials and a small, captive audience. Bethlem's medical superintendent, W. Charles Hood, made Dadd the centrepiece of his 1854 Suggestions for the Future Provision of Criminal Lunatics, treating him as evidence that the criminally insane could be productive under the right regime. Hood is also the reason the Fairy Feller survives at all; the superintendent commissioned it and eventually arranged its transfer to the gallery that became the Tate.

Patrons behind the walls

Dadd's reputation inside the asylum was high enough to attract a royal visit. Queen Victoria, on a formal tour of Bethlem in 1855, asked to see the artist; Dadd presented her with a small watercolour, Sketch of a Fairy, and reportedly received a gratuity of two guineas for it. The exchange is one of the more peculiar encounters in nineteenth-century British art, a future empress inspecting, and effectively commissioning, work from a patient the state had locked up for patricide. The piece remains in the Royal Collection.

Inside Broadmoor, the audience shifted. The asylum's medical officers kept Dadd working, and his later paintings, looser, brighter and more hallucinatory than the Bethlem pictures, were sold or given away as curios to visitors. The fairy paintings, with their tiny obsessed figures and fairy-tale violence, acquired the air of objects made by someone who had stepped sideways out of consensus reality, which is part of the problem. Calling Dadd's art the product of a "fairy-haunted mind", as one nineteenth-century Broadmoor superintendent put it, was a way of domesticating it. It was beautiful because it was mad.

Carter's inheritance

Angela Carter made the inheritance explicit. In essays collected in Nothing Sacred and elsewhere, Carter treated Dadd as a working artist whose strangeness was a method, not a symptom. She read the Fairy Feller as a deliberate composition, a painting in which every figure is a character locked into a narrative the artist had worked out for himself and may never have fully disclosed. The closeness of her own late prose, with its surfaces dense as tapestries and its characters trapped inside fables, makes the lineage obvious.

It also makes the older reading untenable. If Carter could borrow Dadd's method for fiction that was not autobiographical in any clinical sense, then the Fairy Feller is also a constructed object, not a window onto a delusion. The painting took roughly nine years to complete. It is not the splatter of a disturbed mind; it is a picture someone finished.

Reading the work on its own terms

What the new exhibition proposes, in effect, is a counter-reading: take Dadd's paintings out of the case file and put them next to his contemporaries. Place him alongside the Victorian fairy painters of the 1850s and 1860s, alongside Eastlake and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and the question changes. He is not a unique freak. He is a member of a generation of British artists who fell hard for the fairy painting as a genre, who picked up the post-Cruikshank taste for tiny, grotesque figures, and who then took it somewhere stranger than their peers could follow. The asylum gave him years of uninterrupted studio time; it did not invent the obsession.

The structural point is larger than Dadd. Most of what is called outsider art in Britain is in fact art produced by people who happened to be inside institutions, working in conditions the market has never been set up to value. The Bethlem Museum of the Mind, which holds a substantial Dadd archive, has spent the last two decades trying to rebuild the chain of patronage and production around him, and to undo the lazy diagnosis-as-explanation move that has kept his work in a separate category. A show that does the same job for a wider public is overdue.

Stakes and a name to watch

What a viewer loses by accepting the older framing is a serious body of nineteenth-century painting. What they gain by accepting the new one is the chance to argue about Dadd on the same terms as any other British artist of his generation, which is to say about composition, patronage, the market for fairy painting and the political uses of the picturesque. That argument is long overdue. The paintings, after all, have been hanging in the Tate for a hundred and sixty years; only the framing has been locked up.

What remains genuinely contested is the question the old framing used to settle: how much of the strangeness is Dadd and how much is the institution. The sources do not agree, and the curators of the new show are not pretending they do. The most they claim is that the work can be looked at without the case notes in front of it. For an artist who spent forty-three years being read through them, that is a modest, useful correction.

This publication treats Dadd's paintings as the work of a Victorian artist who happened to be confined for most of his career, rather than as the involuntary output of a clinical condition, a position the new show, and Angela Carter's earlier writing, both make explicit.