From the Dark Garden of the Mind

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Although the grave has not actually closed over him, he must be classed among the dead." Few English artists can have received a more crushing valediction than this, written in an art journal in 1843, on a 26-year-old painter named Richard Dadd. He probably never read it, for he had just been bundled off to Bethlem Hospital (whose lugubrious halls of madmen had given the word "bedlam" its English use) in a strait-waistcoat.

That August, the young artist--of whom an acquaintance testified that "a person more invariably gentle, kind, considerate and affectionate did not exist"--had tucked a spring-loaded knife into his pocket and gone for a walk in Cobham Park with his father, a retired chemist and seller of "fine, healthy leeches." Under the delusion that he was an avenging agent of the Egyptian god Osiris and his father a demonic envoy, Richard stabbed him. By the time Robert Dadd's gory corpse was found in the grass, the young man was on his way to Europe, planning to kill the Emperor of Austria. He was arrested in France, after trying to cut the throat of a stranger in a coach with his "excellent English razor," and shipped back to Britain. Dadd spent the last 40 years of his life in madhouses, dying all but forgotten in Broadmoor in 1886. One of his infrequent visitors wrote that though he was still plagued by "thick-coming horrors and portentous visions," Dadd was by then "a pleasant-visaged old man with a long and flowing snow-white beard with mild blue eyes that beam benignly through spectacles when in conversation, or turn up in reverie until their pupils are nearly lost to sight."

Oedipus into Santa Claus--yet the fact was that Dadd, far from becoming one of those psychotic artists whose scribbles are only, or mainly, of interest to analysts, painted many of his best works in the asylum. He labored in a solitude, a vacuum of response, which might have crushed another artist. But it may be that Dadd's enforced seclusion helped sharpen the obsessive quality of his inner vision. Behind bars, time and detail never end. The evidence is up in London's Tate Gallery this summer through August: poor Dadd's first one-man show, more than 200 oils, watercolors and drawings, including a series of mysterious "sketches for the passions" that record Dadd's tormented self-examinations and still belong to Bethlem Hospital. Almost all his known work is at the Tate, and it acquaints us with the most tragically fated and one of the most brilliant talents in all English 19th century art. As Patricia Allderidge, Bethlem's archivist, remarks in her scrupulous and absorbing catalogue: "One did not have to be mad to escape the toils of Victorian genre--but it probably helped."

Dadd's mental collapse had taken place in Egypt (hence, presumably, his "possession" by Osiris), where in 1842 he had gone as traveling artist and companion to a doughty Victorian tourist named Sir Thomas Phillips. The exotic vistas dumbfounded Dadd. "The excitement of these scenes," he wrote to a painter friend in England, "has been enough to turn the brain . . . and often I have lain down at night with my imagination so full of wild vagaries that I have really and truly doubted my own sanity . . . for I've got opened my mind."

Before this Wanderjahr, Dadd's early reputation had been based on painting fairies, elves, goblins and other more or less demure inhabitants of the Victorian psychic zoo. This was not entirely a personal quirk. Fairy pictures, usually based on Shakespearean themes (Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest), had been popular in England since the late 18th century. Dadd's Puck, 1841, was actually based on a version Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, had painted four decades earlier. It is a curiously theatrical piece--dark leaves pearled with glistening dewdrops, tiny Italianate nudes, and a moony Puck grinning like some fat little maharajah under the purple canopy of a morning-glory flower.

What Dadd, in the full stride of his obsession, would finally do with such motifs is shown in two of his master pieces, the Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, which he worked for many years, and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, 1854-58. Contradiction is an astounding synthesis of decorative impulse, teeming fantasy and minute observation. In some details it recalls the delirious gardens of Hieronymus Bosch. The greenstone egg and a tiny figure huddling in a broken eggshell remind one that, before murdering his father, Dadd had alarmed his friends and family by living like a hermit in a studio crammed with hundreds of eggs, which constituted his sole diet.

Coiling Lines. The details of leaves, grasses, butterflies and flowers are done with a molecular precision that exceeds even the English Pre-Raphaelites. In this hallucinated undergrowth, hundreds of tiny figures (the population, good and evil, of Titania's kingdom) are flitting, slithering, prancing and fighting--they merge with the grass stalks, peer from the edge of a leaf or flex their disconcertingly sexy little bodies in an overwhelming display of Dadd's invention. If ever an English painter went to work a millimeter at a time, it was Dadd--he was the Van Eyck of paranoia.

When dealing with a standard classical theme, such as the Bacchanalian Scene, 1862, he produced an image whose presentiments of evil and superbly rhythmic, coiling line seem to anticipate Aubrey Beardsley. But the closeness of Dadd's gaze conferred a disturbing "presence" on even the most ordinary--and, one would have thought, benevolent--subjects. His Portrait of a Young Man, 1853, probably depicts one of the Bethlem doctors, Charles Hood, a mild, compassionate intern whom Dadd liked and trusted. On that writhing rustic bench in front of those fleshy and bedewed leaves with the oppressively large lawnroller in the background, the man seems about to implode. The garden is imaginary, for Dadd's only access to the outside world was the asylum exercise yard. With his wistful craziness, labyrinthine involution of thought and pale, exquisite colors, Dadd is as much a testament to his time and its sublimations as the gentler and saner Lewis Carroll. qed Robert Hughes

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