Richard Dadd is a unique phenomenon in British art, perhaps in Western art in general. A fairly late product of the Romantic Movement, he gave a new dimension to Romanticism's determined pursuit of the irrational. Insane for nearly two thirds of his life, he was able, like a traveller with tales of a fabulous country, to send back reports of his mental terra incognita thanks to the miraculous preservation of his talent under the condition of madness. When the Dadd exhibition was held at the Tate Gallery in 1974, Patricia Allderidge, the organiser, wrote in the catalogue: 'Dadd is known chiefly as a "mad" painter. It is even suggested that madness liberated some latent talent which had not previously been apparent, enabling him to produce one great painting, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (the only picture by which he is widely known'. In view of this public perception of its subject, the exhibition rightly set out to show that Dadd 'was already, before insanity overtook him, an artist of rare perception ...; and that insanity should only be regarded as one of the many influences contributing to his lifelong artistic development.' This aim was achieved, and we now know that Dadd's work, at all stages of his career, was never less than interesting, and often rose to heights of poetic intensity. It remains true, however, that his two indubitable masterpieces - The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, presented by Siegfried Sassoon to the Tate Gallery in 1963, and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania, the present picture -were produced after his insanity had declared itself in the most distressing form and he had been confined to an asylum. In no other works does he give such complete expression to his lyrical but obsessive and often tortured vision, treating subjects that are wholly characteristic with a wealth of teeming detail on a scale which by his standard is considerable and in the enduring medium of oil. Ostensibly they belong to the familiar genre of Victorian fairy painting, but such is the power of imagination displayed that they transcend the limitations of fairy painting and have no meaningful parallel in the whole of Victorian art.

Contradiction, the earlier of the two, was painted in Bethlem Hospital, Southwark (part of which is now the Imperial War Museum) during the years 1854-8. Born in Chatham in 1817, Dadd had enjoyed a brilliant early career, winning three silver medals at the Royal Academy schools and achieving an effortless distinction among his artistic contemporaries. His circle of fellow artists, self-styled 'The Clique', included John Phillip, Augustus Egg, Henry Nelson O'Neil, Alfred Elmore and W.P. Frith, who described him in his Autobiography as 'my superior in all respects; he drew infinitely better than I did ... I can truly say, from a thorough knowledge of Dadd's character, that a nobler being, and one more free from the common failings of humanity, never breathed.' Beginning to exhibit in 1837, first at Suffolk Street, soon at the Royal Academy and the British Institution, he revealed a strong inclination towards imaginative painting, concentrating on fairy subjects and gaining a reputation as their leading exponent. Commissions were not lacking; S.C. Hall included him among the illustrators of his Book of British Ballads (1842), and Lord Foley ordered decorative panels for his London house, 26 Grosvenor Square, Dadd himself choosing subjects from Tasso and Byron. Then in 1842 he was approached by Sir Thomas Phillips, South Wales solicitor and hero of Chartist riots, to accompany him on a tour of the Middle East. He was recommended by David Roberts, and was expected not only to be a travelling companion but to record the architectural sights.

There was clearly a strong streak of madness in Dadd's family. He was one of seven children, four of whom died insane, including also his younger sister Maria Elizabeth, who married the painter John Phillip. In retrospect even his early work sometimes has a manic quality, while his devotion to imaginative subjects seems to strike a warning note in view of what was to follow. At all events, the visual excitement and physical hardship of the ten-month Middle-Eastern tour precipitated a crisis. Dadd returned insane, and in August 1843 murdered his father at Cobham, believing that he was acting as the agent of the Egyptian god Osiris (the tour had included Egypt) who had ordered him to exterminate the devil. Following the murder, he fled to France, where he attempted another and was arrested. Extradited to England before the court proceedings, he appeared before magistrates at Rochester. His behaviour left no doubt of his disturbed state of mind, and on 22 August 1844, almost a year to the day after killing his father, he was committed to Bethlem Hospital.

Dadd was to remain in Bethlem for twenty years, moving in 1864 to the newly built Broadmoor in Berkshire. Conditions had improved considerably since the bad old days when it had been a fashionable pastime to 'view the lunatics' in 'Bedlam', but they were still depressing enough in the criminal department to which Dadd was confined; the building was dark and overcrowded, with no separation of the more refined class of inmate from the hardened criminals. Although he resumed painting almost immediately, and was to remain dedicated to his profession throughout his confinement, his output seems to have been small for the first eight years. Working mainly in watercolour, he hardly ventured beyond subjects he had seen in the Middle East, based on a sketchbook kept on the journey which had come back into his possession. However, a change occurred in 1852 when, following an enquiry by the Commissioners in Lunacy, the Hospital, for the first time in six hundred years, acquired a resident physician superintendent. As Patricia Allderidge has written, 'the man appointed to carry out the reforms was one of the most outstanding in Bethlem's history, Dr William Charles Hood. Appointed at the age of twenty-eight, a man of vision and industry, of compassion, culture and commonsense, he opened the new regime almost symbolically by enlarging the windows throughout the hospital, and within a few years had furnished every ward with an aviary of singing birds as well as flowers, pictures, statuary, books and all the accompaniments of civilisation which could hope to distract and soothe the alienated mind.' (1974 exh., cat. p.30). Hood was ably assisted in his enlightened policy by a new steward, George Henry Haydon, who was only a little older than himself; and both took a keen interest in Dadd and encouraged his painting. Hood was to acquire over thirty examples, including Contradiction, which was by far the most important. Impressed by the picture, Haydon commissioned something similar; The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke was the result. Probably begun about 1857 when Contradiction was nearing completion, it was still not quite finished when Dadd left Bethlem for Broadmoor in 1864.

Although Dadd had specialised in fairy subjects early in his career, these are the only two which he painted during his confinement. Many of his earlier productions had been based on Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night's Dream had inspired Titania Sleeping and Puck (1974 exh., nos. 57-8, both repr. in cat.), the two pictures which established his reputation as a fairy painter, exhibited respectively at the Royal Academy and Suffolk Street in 1841; while The Tempest suggested the theme of 'Come unto these Yellow Sands' (1974 exh., no.68, repr. in cat.), another important example shown at the R.A. in 1842. Puck was also Dadd's subject in the illustrations he produced this year for 'The Ballad of Robin Goodfellow' in S.C. Hall's Book of British Ballads.

In Contradiction he returned once again to A Midsummer Night's Dream, representing Oberon and Titania at the moment of their quarrel over Titania's refusal to give up her Indian changeling boy to be Oberon's page.

Oberon. I'll met by moonlight, proud Titania
Titania. What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence:
I have forsworn his bed and company.

The incident occurs in Act II, scene 1, not, as Dadd indicates in the inscription on the back, in Act II, scene 2; and there is artistic licence in the presence on the right of Demetrius and Helena, one of the play's two pairs of human lovers, who, as Patricia Allderidge points out, 'have strayed in ahead of cue' (they should not appear until after the fairies have left). As for the rest of the imagery, the 1974 exhibition catalogue need only be quoted again. 'The prodigality of Dadd's imagination in this work seems to be inexhaustible, and besides the obvious inventiveness of the design and of the main characters and their costumes, a host of tiny creatures teem through the foreground and background. In the bottom half of the picture are many kinds of elves and sprites, including soldiers with bows and spears and gleaming shields, a centaur, and fairies with gossamer wings and flowing robes. On the right, next to Demetrius and Helena, a party of soldiers are loading a fir-cone onto a snail's back .... At the bottom left a struggle is going on to prevent Titania from being shot by a grotesque archer, surrounded by hoardes of watchers peering round and over the leaves. Nearer the centre Titania herself ... has trampled a flower underfoot together with its fairy occupant, setting off a flurry of activity in the area. These are just a few of the larger and more obvious figures in the lower half; but many more pursue each other, or merely lurk, amongst the foliage. In the upper part of the picture, a group of revellers, including a fawn, with musical instruments, are dancing across the top platform carrying the body of a deer, while other fantastic creatures disport themselves on and around the exquisite inventions which lie somewhere between architecture and still-life. Just behind Titania's head is one of the elves who, when Oberon and Titania quarrel, "for fear, creep into acorn-cups and hide them there." Behind Oberon .... are some of his attendants; and in the distant background, almost in another world, are far-off hills and some kind of fortress.' The numerous plants include 'the grasses which bow their dew-laden heads across the top, convulvulus, and fat toadstools ... (as well as) honeysuckle, solomon's seal, harebells, and violets ... Dew drops ... seem to have been poured from a bucket to run down every surface, lying thickly over the leaves, trickling from grass and flower petals, clinging to Helena's gown and hat and sprinkling her foot, and dropping from the wing tips of the fairies.'

Dadd is seen working on the picture in the only known photograph of him in Bethlem (see above). The whole design has been laid in, and he is painstakingly completing it, detail by minute detail, from the lower right corner upwards. Evidence of this method is still traceable in some of the larger leaves, where sections painted at different times show slight variations in colour. Technically the work is an astonishing tour de force. However 'mad' Dadd may have been, it certainly in no way confused his drawing or handling of paint; on the contrary, the painting has a positively surreal clarity. It remains in a superb state of preservation, never having been re-lined and still possessing the original oval stretcher seen in the photograph.

Contradiction and The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke overlap in character and style as well as in time. Products of the same laborious but brilliant technique, they share a gem-like precision of form, a mood of hallucinatory stillness, and an abundance of detail astonishing both for its superfluity and the skill with which Dadd keeps it under control. Each is evidence of a phenomenal visual memory which, when brought to bear on natural phenomena, results in an almost mystical involvement, deeply moving in view of Dadd's actual surroundings of cell, crowded gallery, and bleak exercise yard. (Despite Hood's reforms, an account of Dadd at work in the 1850s, no doubt on these very paintings, describes him 'weaving his fine fancies on the canvas amidst the most revolting conversation and the most brutal behaviour.') Not surprisingly, there is also common imagery. In the Tate painting Oberon and Titania re-appear, albeit as subsidiary figures. The idea is repeated of raising many of the figures on platforms in order to reduce the sense of recession and create a flat, tapestry-like effect. The grasses which help to frame the design in Contradiction are made to career across the canvas in swirling diagonals.

According to Dadd's own account of the conception of the Fairy Feller, 'imagination would not be deliberately invoked; so he gazed at the canvas and thought of nothing, until pure fancy began to give form to the cloudy paint which he had already smeared over it' (1974 exh. cat., under no.190). Some such process may have been at work in the development of Contradiction, but the fact that Dadd was closer to a literary source in this painting suggests that it was not so 'automatic'; and certainly it must have been combined with those memories of formal sources which play a significant part in the gestation of most works of art. The wide border of leaves, glasses, flowers, toadstools and butterflies, which again contributes so much to the decorative effect, is anticipated in the Titania Sleeping and Puck of 1841, the first of which has a border of flowers, leaves and bat wings, the second one of morning-glory dripping with dew. Patricia Allderidge has suggested that this and other compositional features of the 1841 paintings which find echoes in Contradiction were themselves borrowed from Maclise (1974 exh. cat., under nos. 57-8). Other motifs hark back to Dadd's Middle Eastern travels. The figure of Oberon recalls his description, in a letter to Frith, of a Syrian sheikh, with a 'black grizzly beard (which) would make capital brushes', whose band of arab tribesmen captured his party at Jericho and bargained with their escort for a ransom. The friezes of gambolling fairies may owe something to classical reliefs he had seen on the journey, possibly even the famous scenes of Greeks fighting Amazons from the Mausoleum, which Sir Stratford Canning had asked Sir Thomas Phillips to inspect at Bodrum with a view to acquiring them for the British Museum. Dadd had sketched the reliefs, and they certainly inspired other works undertaken in Bethlem. Further details in Contradiction, such as Titania's yellow dress and the lyre held by Demetrius, must also have classical origins.

But Dadd was not only quoting himself or thinking of his foreign travels; he was also aware of other artists who had treated his theme. A Midsummer Night's Dream had played a crucial part in the development of fairy painting, Reynolds, Fuseli, Blake and (rather surprisingly) Landseer being among those it inspired. One of the most relevant precedents for Dadd was a Contention of Oberon and Titania by Henry Howard (1769-1847), who was Professor of Painting when Dadd was a student at the Royal Academy schools in the late 1830s. Howard specialised in fairy themes and in his lectures recommended 'the Midsummer Fairies' as a subject. Other significant parallels are the well-known paintings of the quarrel and reconciliation of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton. The Quarrel had been Paton's diploma work for the Royal Scottish Academy in 1846. The Reconciliation had appeared at the R.S.A. in 1847, won a premium in the Westminster Hall competition of that year, and been brought for the R.S.A. collection. Finally, in 1850, Paton had repeated the Quarrel on a larger scale as a companion to the Reconciliation, which it later joined in the National Gallery of Scotland. The fame of these compositions almost certainly ensured that Dadd knew of them, even in his isolation, where it is known that he eagerly seized on information about his profession from the outside world. They may even have inspired him to reassert his position as the leading fairy painter of the day, which Paton had inadvertently usurped. If so, who can say, in retrospect at least, that he was unsuccessful? Paton's pictures are charming, but Dadd tackles his subject at an altogether deeper level. The utter clarity of detail, the highly original but far from superficially attractive colour scheme, the touches of cruelty and humour, all spring from a vision which is totally at home with itself and carries entire conviction. Paton's pictures are essentially
'thought up'; Dadd, so to speak, has 'been there'. It is a classic
demonstration of Coleridge's distinction between Fancy and Imagination.
The picture's critical history is of interest in itself. It was first exhibited in 1930, and in 1937 Laurence Binyon, whose sympathies embraced oriental art, Blake and the work of Charles Ricketts, wrote of its 'lovely precision of detail ... It has a character completely its own.' Despite the advent of Surrealism, which might have been expected to bring it to prominence, it then disappeared from view, Sacheverell Sitwell referring to it in 1937 as 'missing'. However, with the revival of interest in Victorian art in the 1960s, its importance was quickly and universally recognised. Jeremy Maas described it in 1969 as one of 'the great imaginative pictures of the Victorian age', and the 1974 exhibition brought it plaudits from all sides. Keith Roberts placed it 'among the wonders of nineteenth-century British painting.' Patricia Allderidge summed it up as 'a picture of which one knows with absolute certainty that it represents the perfect consummation of the painter's inspiration.' In America Robert Hughes saw it as 'an astounding synthesis of decorative impulse, teeming fantasy and minute observation. In some details it recalls the delirious gardens of Hieronymus Busch ... The leaves, grasses, butterflies and flowers are done with a molecular precision that exceeds even the Pre-Raphaelites.'

Six years before the Tate exhibition, the picture had been seen in the major show of Victorian Paintings at Bradford; and in 1980 it was included in the survey of two hundred years of British art mounted by the British Council in Munich. But it was perhaps in the saleroom that it gained its greatest fame. As early as 1964 it was sold for (7,000, a large sum for that date when the Victorian revival was hardly under way; and when it appeared at auction again in 1983 it fetched no less than (550,000, a world record for a Victorian painting which evoked extensive comment in the press. The record was not to be broken until 1987, when Rossetti's Proserpine was sold at Christie's for the current record of (1.3 million.