Overview
- The Royal Academy’s exhibition Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam runs from Saturday, July 25 to 25 October 2026 and brings together about 100 paintings and drawings, the most comprehensive Dadd show since 1974.
- Guest curator Nicholas Tromans assembled the works and the catalogue includes essays by art historians and a psychiatrist, Robert Howard, who offers a retrospective diagnosis of schizophrenia for Dadd.
- Dadd’s biography is central to the show: he trained at the Royal Academy, travelled in the Near East in 1842–43 after which he experienced psychosis, killed his father in 1843, and was confined to Bethlem and later Broadmoor until his death in 1886.
- Curators and reviewers note the clash between admiration for Dadd’s technical mastery—tiny, jewel-like surfaces and obsessive detail—and the need for contextual sensitivity, with wall text apologising for racial caricatures in some biblical and Orientalist images.
- The exhibition and its framing are likely to reshape public views by treating Dadd simultaneously as a trained Victorian artist and a long-term psychiatric patient, which raises questions about diagnosis, how asylum regimes allowed artistic work, and how museums present difficult historical material.