Richard Dadd - The Flight from Insanity to Murder: A Forensic Navigation of the Recondite Artist

Forester, Kim (2025) Richard Dadd - The Flight from Insanity to Murder: A Forensic Navigation of the Recondite Artist. Masters thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Aged twenty-six, during a psychotic episode, the artist Richard Dadd (1817-1886) murdered his father in Cobham Park, Kent. Subsequently, Dadd spent the rest of his life in the Victorian asylum system, continuing to paint at the infamous Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam) and at the equally notorious Broadmoor. Previous scholarly focus has viewed Dadd’s oeuvre as being within the vanguard of original enchanted invention and since the 1960s, Dadd has become a poster-boy for ‘outsider art’. Conversely, this thesis argues that Richard Dadd has largely been mythologised by earlier researchers and evaluates a fresh idea that The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke amounted to Dadd’s own ‘Last Judgement’. In the past, with the reinforcement of retrospection, study of Dadd’s artwork has chiefly been viewed through the stereoscopic lens of modern psychiatric understanding, projecting a neoteric perception of a psychotic, paranoid-schizoid artist onto his work. Therefore, this thesis breaks with previous convention and, in direct contrast, considers whether Dadd was inspired by his own lived experience rather than topics suggested by doctors charged with his care. This idea is a radical new way of looking at Dadd’s art, that is not from the top down where the control of those who ran nineteenth-century asylums held sway, but rather from below, where the patient’s perspective is represented. To accomplish its objective, the thesis employs a forensic approach to evaluate the concurrent evidence surrounding Dadd’s criminal insanity, physical act of murder, and artistic production. Richard Dadd was a recondite artist: his work was obscure, complex, concealed, and hidden, so this thesis untangles Dadd’s enigmatic imagery to offer a different viewpoint, serving as a re-evaluation of Dadd’s art, whilst broadening critical focus, with the hope of reinvigorating Dadd research.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	22 Jun 2026 08:11
Last Modified:	22 Jun 2026 08:11
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103457
DOI:

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