Richard Dadd - Suffolk Street, London, UK
N 51° 30.530 W 000° 07.859
30U E 699089 N 5710314
This Greater London Council blue plaque, to the painter Richard Dadd, is attached to a building on the north east side of Suffolk Street.
Waymark Code: WMM80W
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 08/07/2014
Views: 2
The GLC blue plaque tells us:
Greater London Council
Richard
Dadd
1817 - 1886
Painter
lived here
The Art Magick website tells us about Richard Dadd:
Richard Dadd is remembered today for the mysterious and magical fairy paintings produced after his tumultuous descent into the realms of madness and insanity.
Richard Dadd's early paintings were of landscape, marine and animal subjects. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1837 and became a founder member of a group of artists known as 'The Clique'.
In 1842 Dadd travelled to the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The exhilaration of the journey was such that Dadd already doubted his own sanity on his return to London. He entered the competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, but after his design was rejected his mental health deteriorated, resulting in the murder of his father in August 1843.
Dadd fled to France but was arrested and admitted to Bethlem Hospital. His schizophrenia was recognised and he was extremely fortunate in being attended by sympathetic doctors who encouraged him to paint. Isolated from the world outside and from new developments in art, he fell back upon the themes of his sane period, historical and literary subjects, portraits and fairies.
Dadd's most extraordinary achievement is the enigmatic The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64), a hallucinatory vision of fantastic creatures, seen as if with a magnifying glass through a delicate network of grasses and flowers. All are watching the fairy woodman (or 'feller') aiming his axe at a hazelnut, a moment pregnant with never-to-be-explained significance.
Dadd spent the last 22 years of his life at Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane where he died in 1886.