No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of tiny folk, summoned by a dragonfly trumpeter, marshalled by a pompous chamberlain no bigger than a daisy, all gathered in the presence of Merlin (dead centre) to witness a macho fairy break a hazelnut with an axe. The shell will serve, of course, as Queen Mab’s chariot.

And yet the scene isn’t cute. By placing the shiny bald pate of a frightened gnome a jot too close to the swing of the axe, the artist suggests the fairy feller might break that nut instead. Dadd is like a Victorian Hieronymus Bosch.

The fabled painting was donated to the Tate by Siegfried Sassoon in 1963 in memory of his friend Julian Dadd, the painter’s great-nephew, and his two brothers, all killed in the Great War. It also went on to inspire a song by Freddie Mercury.

For 42 years, Bethlem and Broadmoor were Dadd’s prison, home and studio

For 42 years, Bethlem and Broadmoor were Dadd’s prison, home and studio

I eagerly signed up for the press preview for Dadd’s forthcoming Royal Academy show, then looked twice at the address. It was the Bethlem Royal Hospital in East Croydon, a working psychiatric hospital, the modern incarnation of Bedlam, which relocated to suburban south London in the 1930s. I discovered it to be a spacious, welcoming campus. Alongside secure areas, there’s a café, a gallery and the Museum of the Mind, which holds the Dadd archive.

Dadd murdered his father during a psychotic episode in 1843, and was committed to permanent custody without trial. For 42 years, Bethlem and Broadmoor were his prison, home and studio, and the wardens his substitute family, who often cherished his work. The compassion with which he was treated gives one hope.

At Bethlem Hospital I met the infinitely patient, clever Nicholas Tromans, a working NHS probation officer, Victorian art scholar and Dadd specialist, author of The Artist and the Asylum (2012). There could scarcely be a better qualified person to curate this landmark survey, which engages frankly with the psychiatric background.

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