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The story of Richard Dadd is well known to historians of art and madness. He was the promising young Victorian artist who, believing his father was Satan, murdered him and subsequently spent the rest of his life in the criminal lunatic departments of Bethlem and Broadmoor, where he continued to paint and to produce works that were arguably more compelling than those he completed before he developed psychosis. In this new and splendidly illustrated book, Nicholas Tromans, an art historian at Kingston University, London, provides a thoughtful and balanced commentary on the Dadd story, which draws on the past three decades of research in the history of psychiatry to create a nuanced and in-depth picture of the 19th-century parricide. Tromans looks at the relationship between madness and creativity, the nature of Dadd's mental disturbance and his time in the asylum.
Some artists stop being creative when they develop psychosis; some, like the ‘schizophrenic masters’ in the Prinzhorn collection, only start painting after they go mad. Dadd's case is rather different. His remarkable technical skills were unaffected by his descent into mental illness and, indeed, in The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke and Contradiction:...