The Halt in the Desert, by Richard Dadd

At Tate Britain's current exhibition, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting I discovered the work of Richard Dadd. Dadd was a young artist who, in 1842, went on the Grand Tour of the antiquities of the ancient world. There he developed an illness, possibly schizophrenia, though it was thought at first to be sunstroke, which led him to believe he was under the control of the Egyptian god, Osiris. He later murdered his father, fearing him to be inhabited by the devil, and was sentenced to detention for life in Bethlem Hospital, Bedlam, where he lived for twenty years before being moved to Broadmoor. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the age of 71. Dadd continued to paint all the time he was incarcerated, and is now recognised as one of the most unusual and original artists of the Victorian era. He specialised in pictures of fairies and of Oriental scenes, often painted in meticulous detail. His pictures, even those of actual scenes, combine acute observation with a sense of surreal fantasy. Many of his paintings describe images recalled in memory from his journey in 1842.

At the exhibition I came across a novel by Jennifer Higgie, called Bedlam, which evokes the fateful year in which Dadd developed his illness. The book describes it through Richard's eyes, using a series of short impressionistic chapters that slowly evolve to reveal the growing tensions within his mind. But while we experience Dadd's slow descent into paranoia, we also experience his artist's vision, which remains awed by the landscape and cities through which he passes. Higgie's writing is as poetic and as meticulously observed as Dadd's paintings, and through it we see, hear and feel the mind of Dadd struggling to maintain his powers of observation even while he loses his reason. It is a remarkable book, a great piece of writing, and I want to explore it more thoroughly in a review, which I shall begin as soon as I have finished reading it!

 


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