Richard Dadd review – can his mental illness help explain these arresting, bizarre images?

Royal Academy, London Dadd was already a remarkable artist – with fairies as his hit theme – before he was locked up for murder. Yet it was within the confines of Bedlam that he saw nature and art afresh The young man in the garden must be one of Richard Dadd’s fellow patients in Bedlam, you think. His unkempt hair and ruffled clothes are sure indications of a distracted mind as he sits, half his face in shadow, hands nervously clasped, on a fabulously twisted wooden bench surrounded by greenery that’s almost too lush for comfort. Yet the subject of Dadd’s 1853 Portrait of a Young Man is proba

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