Richard Dadd beyond the Bedlam story
A new Royal Academy catalogue and Jennifer Higgie’s reissued novel revisit Richard Dadd through his practice, references and circumstances rather than through madness alone. The exhibition in London asks viewers to look at how his images are made, and what they reveal.
The Art Newspaper’s piece is tied to Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam at the Royal Academy of Arts, which runs in London until 25 October. It also notes the July 2026 reissue of Jennifer Higgie’s Bedlam: A Novel, a work of fiction that imagines Dadd’s 1842-43 journey through Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, his descent into paranoia after returning to England, the murder of his father and the decades he spent at Bethlem and Broadmoor.
The exhibition catalogue takes a different route. Its essays place Dadd within the training he received, the visual conventions he absorbed, the literature and politics around him, and the hospital setting in which he continued to work, with doctors and attendants acting as sitters, patrons and critics.
Looking closely at how the pictures work
For artists and drawing enthusiasts, that shift matters. Dadd’s sketchbooks and travel images are presented as records of close looking: fine lines, landscapes, temples, wide vistas and local costume all register colour, fabric, atmosphere and place before the imagery turns inward or uncanny.
The catalogue also shows how crowded his inventions are with sources. The fairies, classical bodies and looping arabesques draw on Flaxman, Fuseli, Shakespeare and Greek myth, while The Child’s Problem opens onto abolitionist imagery and the political world of his time. The result is a view of Dadd as a painter of memory, quotation and visual transformation, not only of a notorious life.
Source : The Art Newspaper