Above is an amazing painting called Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58). It’s based on events in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream and feature’s the couple’s argument over who should adopt the ‘little changeling boy’. I’m not allowed to photograph close ups but you can see some of the detail in the picture.

Richard Dadd was a precociosly talented artist from a young age. Above is a self-portrait in oils along with studies of his family done in watercolour in 1838 when he was 21 – Dadd is top row centre. His father is top right. Having been taken on a ‘grand tour’ around eastern Europe and Egypt as a new graduate of the Royal College of Art, he started having ‘delusions’, believing himself to be the son of the Egyptian god, Osiris. On his return he murdered his father and attacked another man. Despite escaping to France he was arrested and sent back to England. First of all he stayed in the security of Bethlam – known as Bedlam – in Lambeth and then to Broadmoor, a newly established hospital for the insane.

Whilst at Broadmoor Dadd used his sketchbooks from his travels and his vivid memory to create extraordinary paintings which conjure the romance of his travels and stories from history in Egypt.

Dadd created a series entitled ‘The Passions’, depicting extremes of emotion and human motivation .

The watercolours are full of narrative detail and strange emotion. Above is a very sensitive portrait entitled Celandine which shows how delicate and carefully composed his imaginative paintings were.

On the left is Dadd’s early work depicting fairies. This one is entitled ‘Puck’, the mischievous fairy from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s dream surrounded by dancing fairies. This picture, along with other impressions of an uncanny, magical world, attracted positive attention and launched the young artist. After his travels, the disastrous mania, the murder of his father and life in a secure prison, Dadd returned to these themes in later life and painted fabulously detailed fantasy scenes .

This work, above, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke took ten years to paint. You can stare at it for ages and keep seeing new faces, figures and forms appearing in the textured paint.

A truly enchanting show which rightfully celebrates an extraordinary artist who, one could argue, benefitted from incarceration because it gave him time to explore his own wild imagination and he was encouraged in his art by the doctors who ‘managed’ him during his 43 years of incarceration, offering him materials and portrait commissions.

The show is on at the Jillian and Arthur M Sackler Wing at the Royal Academy of Arts on Piccadilly until 25th October 2026.