Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam

Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam is on at the Royal Academy of Arts from 25 July to 25 October 2026. It's a proper look at the Victorian painter Richard Dadd (1817–1886), whose fairy paintings became his signature long before he spent the bulk of his life behind locked doors.

He started as an exceptional student at the Royal Academy in the late 1830s, and from there he travelled through Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt. He came back with highly detailed sketches and, as the story goes, a psychotic illness that led him to kill his father, whom he believed was the devil. He spent the next 42 years as a patient in Bethlem Royal Hospital and later Broadmoor in Berkshire, where he was encouraged to paint. The result was a body of work produced from inside the Victorian asylum, full of extraordinary and painstaking detail. The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke is the big one here — it took him nine years to finish.

His art was all but forgotten until it resurfaced in the 1970s, and since then it's caught the attention of artists and writers like Cornelia Parker and Angela Carter, and even the band Queen. The exhibition catalogue, by Nicholas Tromans and other scholars, re-examines his legacy.

You'll find it at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London W1J 0BD, running from 25 July to 25 October 2026.