neil-gaiman:odditiesoflife:The Schizophrenic Murdering ArtistRichard Dadd was a young British painte
neil-gaiman:odditiesoflife:The Schizophrenic Murdering ArtistRichard Dadd was a young British painter of huge promise who fell into mental illness while touring the Mediterranean in the early 1840s. He spent over forty years in lunatic asylums, dying at Broadmoor in 1886. During that time he painted, producing mesmerizingly detailed watercolors and oil paintings of which The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is now the most well known.Among the symptoms of Dadd’s illness – which sounds today like a form of schizophrenia – were delusions of persecution and the receipt of messages from the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. Dadd was commanded to kill his father and did so in the summer of 1843. After an equally well planned escape to France, the artist was eventually admitted to the Criminal Lunatic department of Bethlem Hospital in Lambeth (now the Imperial War Museum) and it was here that he painted the Fairy Feller. According to the inscription on the back of the canvas it took him nine years to complete, between 1855 and 1864.The photo is by Dr Diamond. who photographed the inmates of Bedlam…Also, the Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is unfinished. Look at the bottom of the painting and those light brown areas, like the axe and some of the nuts… -- source link