Nick Tromans (Art & Design History / Surveying & Planning) has recently published a new book on the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, one of the most extraordinary figures of nineteenth-century art.
Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum Tate Publishing 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ bookreviews/8668171/Richard-Dadd-The-Artist-and-the-Asylum-by-Nicholas-Tromans-review.html
A brilliant young painter specialising in romantic literary subjects – especially Shakespearean fairies – Dadd toured the Middle East in the 1840s, bringing home sketchbooks full of exquisite drawings. But he then fell victim to a psychotic mental illness, killed his father and spent the remaining decades of his life in Bethlem Hospital and then Broadmoor.
The book includes much new material on Dadd, including the long poem the artist wrote to explain what has become his most famous painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which he painted for a member of staff at Bethlem. This fantasically complex image incorporates a large cast of characters, beginning with Shakespeare’s Queen Mab who spends her time galloping about planting dreams in sleepers’ minds. In the detail from the picture shown here, the tiny figures of Mab and her elaborate retinue (who include a risqué French dancer whom Dadd remembered from the London stage of the 1830s) process leftwards along the bizarrely elongated brim of a hat worn by a character identified by the artist as “the Patriarch”.
Nick’s book has been widely reviewed in the press and has led to some interesting lecturing invitations, including one from English Touring Opera who have staged Purcell’s Fairy Queen in a mental hospital with sets inspired by Dadd’s paintings.
On 1 December, Tate Britain, who own the Fairy Feller, will be hosting an evening of discussion around Dadd’s work, led by Nick and the historian of medicine Mike Jay: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/talks/24959.htm
For a copy of this exciting new book see:
