Royal Academy Exhibition and Catalogue Reassess Richard Dadd Beyond Madness and Murder

Key facts

• Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 25 October.
• The accompanying catalogue, published 10 July, costs £30/£25 and contains 160 pages with 110 colour illustrations.
• Dadd murdered his father in 1843 and spent 42 years confined at Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) and Broadmoor psychiatric hospital.
• Curator Nicholas Tromans reconstructs Dadd's career while hospitalised, noting that Bethlem steward George Henry Haydon commissioned The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (1855-64).
• Sarah Thomas links The Child's Problem (1857) to abolitionist imagery but leaves Dadd's political stance unresolved.
• Cora Gilroy-Ware identifies classical and literary sources—John Flaxman, Daniel Maclise, Henry Fuseli, Shakespeare, Greek mythology—in Dadd's fairy paintings.
• Psychiatrist Robert Howard retrospectively diagnoses Dadd with schizophrenia in the catalogue's final essay.
• Jennifer Higgie's novel Bedlam, first published in 2006, is reissued by Verso in July 2026 (240pp, £10.99).