| Richard Dadd |
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| 1817 births | |
| 1886 deaths | |
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Richard Dadd ( August 1 1817 – January 7 1886 ) was a Victorian painter noted for his depictions of Fairies and other supernatural subjects, Orientalist scenes, and enigmatic genre scenes, rendered with obsessively minuscule detail. Most of the works for which he is best known were created while he was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. His aptitude for drawing was evident at an early age, leading to his admission to the Royal Academy Of Arts at the age of 20. With William Powell Frith , Augustus Egg , Henry O'Neil and others, he founded The Clique , of which he was generally considered the leading talent. During a trip to the Middle East and Europe in 1842 , Dadd became progressively less rational and increasingly violent, believing himself to be under the influence of the Egyptian god Osiris . His condition was initially thought to be Sunstroke . On his return in the spring of 1843 , he was diagnosed to be of unsound mind and was taken by his family to recuperate in the countryside village of Cobham, Kent . In August of that year, Dadd murdered his father with a knife while deluded, believing him to be the Devil in disguise, and fled for France ; en route to Paris Dadd attempted to murder another tourist with a razor, but was unsuccessful and was arrested by the police. Dadd confessed to the murder of his father and was returned to England , where he was committed to the criminal department of Bethlem psychiatric hospital. In the hospital he was allowed to continue to paint and it was here that many of his masterpieces were created. After 20 years at Bethlem, in July of 1864, perhaps because Bedlam was overcrowded, Dadd was moved to a new lunatic asylum at Broadmoor , outside London. Here he remained, painting constantly and receiving infrequent visitors until January 7, 1886, when died, "from an extensive disease of the lungs." Which condition he suffered from is unclear, but it is usually understood to be a form of Schizophrenia . Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that he suffered from what is now known as Bipolar Disorder . He appears to have been genetically predisposed to mental illness; two of his siblings were similarly afflicted, while a third had "a private attendant" for unknown reasons. His most celebrated painting, '' The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke '', was to become the title of a song by the Rock Band Queen . ''Come unto these Yellow Sands'', a play based on his life, was written by Angela Carter . Oliver Knussen considered naming his piece ''Flourish with Fireworks'' after ''The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke'', as its composition owes a lot to the small, exquisite, quirky details in the painting and contains a similar attempted correlation of large and small scale. '' The Wee Free Men '', a novel by Terry Pratchett , edited in 2003, was in a central part inspired by ''The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke''. The painting also is a plot element in '' The Witches Of Chiswick '' by Robert Rankin . SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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