Dadd exhibition tests how art institutions handle mental illness

The Royal Academy has opened Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition dedicated to the 19th-century artist in more than 50 years. In a deliberate curatorial shift, the exhibition omits Dadd’s medical records and refers only briefly to the severe psychosis that led him to murder his father and spend 43 years in Bethlem hospital asylum. The institution is instead presenting his career as a coherent whole.

This approach departs from how Dadd has been viewed since his mid-20th-century rediscovery, when he was largely treated as a medical case study. Co-curator Sylvie Broussine argues that focusing on his institutionalisation is reductive. “The before and after narrative is reductive: his style changes, but that happens with many different artists in all different circumstances. A number of his subjects remain the same,” she explains.

The exhibition pairs Dadd’s 1841 RA piece Titania Sleeping with his later, intricately detailed The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, painted between 1855 and 1864. The juxtaposition challenges the assumption that his retreat into fantasy was merely a symptom of mental detachment. Yet, separating the art from the artist's mind remains difficult. “But his language intensified – you can’t look at The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke without noticing a certain mania in the way he painted it – in its incredible intricacy and focus on detail,” notes Jennifer Higgie, author of a new novel coinciding with the exhibition.

This curatorial restraint has drawn criticism from within the modern mental health community. Andrea Mindel, a member of the Bethlem Artist Collective based at the hospital’s gallery, warns that downplaying Dadd’s illness perpetuates a broader societal reticence. “The problem with institutional exhibitions like this is that they set the tone of how he’s perceived for the next 50 years – so I think it’s really important to own it, to say ‘this is a difficult thing to discuss’,” she says.

Co-curator Nicholas Tromans rejects the discredited historical practice of using art as psychiatric diagnosis. “No more than were I writing about JMW Turner or Claude Monet have I pretended to know exactly what he thought and felt whilst making his pictures,” he says. Still, he acknowledges an undeniable parallel in the work: “I like to point out that his characters never seem to interact, his figures never talk to each other or look at each other or say anything to each other. It’s impossible not to see in that a reflection of what we know about him, which was that he was very cut off and did not tend to talk to other people very much.”

The RA’s handling of these tensions carries implications for how publicly funded cultural spaces navigate mental health. The academy engaged a sensitivity panel comprising three members of the Bethlem Artist Collective, including Mindel, to review its gallery texts. The exhibition also features NHS support signposting and a quiet space for reflection.

For working artists with mental health conditions, the framing of historical figures like Dadd directly impacts their own institutional reception. Karim Sultan of the Bethlem Gallery emphasises the need for a level playing field. “Nobody’s really sure who’s who until people start speaking to one another. At the end of the day, if you’re coming into the space and you’re working as an artist, then that’s what you are,” he says.