Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd (August 1, 1817 - January 7, 1886) was a Victorian painter of fairies and other supernatural subjects, depicting them with obsessively minuscule detail. A talented early career led to 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.

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.

On his return, he was diagnosed to be of unsound mind and was taken by his family to recuperate in the countryside village of Cobham, Kent. In 1843, Dadd murdered his father with a knife whilst 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, he was transferred to Broadmoor, another psychiatric hospital, where he lived out the rest of his life.

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.

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. "The Wee Free Men"- a discworld novel by Terry Pratchett edited in 2003 was in a central part inspired by the painting "the fairy feller's Master-Stroke".

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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