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A portrait painted by an acclaimed Victorian artist while he was a long-term psychiatric patient is to return to the hospital where he spent 20 years, which is now a museum.
Richard Dadd was sent to Bethlem Royal hospital in south London, from which the derogatory term “bedlam” is derived, as a “criminal lunatic” after stabbing his father to death in 1843. He was later moved to Broadmoor, where he remained until his death in 1886.
He painted Portrait of a Young Man 10 years after arriving at Bethlem. The identity of the sitter is unknown, but is thought to be either a fellow patient or Dr William Hood, the hospital’s physician superintendent, who encouraged Dadd to continue to paint. The sitter is painted in a fantasy garden.
The work has been loaned by the Tate to the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, where it will be displayed alongside an 1857 photographic portrait showing Dadd painting at Bethlem. The exhibition, The Faces We Present, opens in February.
In the early years of his artistic life, Dadd was recognised as one of the great talents of his generation.
