Richard Dadd at Orleans House Gallery
Some London Historians arranged to meet for lunch today in Twickenham and then venture to the nearby Orleans House Gallery to see the Richard Dadd (1817 – 1886) exhibition, which runs until 2 October. It’s just a 20 minute drive for me, so I took the bold step of inviting myself along.
Despite the proximity to London Historians Towers, I had never been to this gallery, which nestles in a leafly off-the-beaten-track spot adjacent to Eel Pie Island. I shall certainly go again, perhaps even to the Dadd exhibition: I had to do a speed tour due to my parking running out of time.
Dadd. Fairly well known Victorian painter, certainly highly rated by contemporaries. If you’re unfamiliar, he was extremely mentally disturbed, spending most his life from his late 20s incarcerated in the Bethlem Hospital (aka Bedlam, then in St Georges Fields, Southwark; the building is now the Imperial War Museum), followed by the newly-built Broadmoor in Crowthorne, Berks. It was during a tour of Europe and the Near East in 1842-43 that Dadd suffered some sort of mental breakdown while in Egypt, believing himself to be the Egyptian god Osiris. On returning to England, the now utterly paranoid artist lured his father into a local park and murdered him with a knife. Dadd fled to Paris but was soon extradited. At his trial in 1844 it became immediately apparent that he was insane and instead of an appointment with the gallows, Dadd was institutionalised.
At both Bedlam and Broadmoor, Richard Dadd continued to paint, steadily if not especially prolifically. Represented here at the downstairs section of the exhibition are mainly figurative watercolours of medieval flavour, the theme being illustrations of the Passions: Grief, Pain, Sorrow, Brutality, etc. Upstairs we have items from the Broadmoor period which fall into two groups: glass panels whereby images have been created by scraping away a coating of white residue; and oil on canvas panels created for theatrical productions inside the institution. Once again, the themes if not the style are firmly late-Medieval.
There is also a small selection of paintings – mainly portraits – that Dadd made before his mental illness set in.
Before today, my only acquaintance with Dadd was his basic story outlined above, the only photograph taken of him in the 1850s (a bit scary) and what is considered his masterpiece, Contraditions: Oberon and Titania (not on show, unfortunately). So it was good to be able to see a large body of his work in the round, so to speak, some pieces of which are excellent, others less so. One has to imagine that his state of mind on given days must have affected his ability to a certain extent, but on a positive note, I’d like to think that painting had a certain positive therapeutic effect on this tortured soul.
More on Dadd at Wikipedia here.
There is a recently published book on Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum (2011) by N. Tromans.
Thanks for the heads-up (as Martin Lukes would say). I hope we can fit a visit into our schedule before the Dadd exhibition ends.
Dadd’s is a very sad story and I wonder whether, had he lived in our own time, modern medicine could have cured him or at least controlled the disease.
Thank you for your kind comments about the gallery and the Richard Dadd exhibition. It was a pleasure to curate.
If you enjoyed the Richard Dadd exhibition, this retrospective by another visionary outsider artist will appeal!
Madge Gill: Medium & Visionary
Orleans House Gallery, Riverside, Twickenham, TW1 3DJ
Until 26 January 2014
With no training and no aspirations to fame, Madge Gill produced thousands of ink drawings during her lifetime. Her work remains an enigma: is it true she was inspired by an ethereal spirit guide? Was she genuinely in touch with ‘the beyond’, or was art-making a form of self therapy?
Orleans House Gallery invites you to delve into the world of Madge Gill (1882 – 1961) in this major retrospective exhibition supported by the Wellcome Trust. Featuring over 100 original artworks, and contextual photographs and documents, this exhibition is the first of its kind. Madge Gill was championed and collected by Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term ‘art brut’ (raw art), the precursor to the term ‘Outsider Art’. Gill is considered the most important, influential and recognised British ‘outsider artist.’ This project explores Gill’s work, history and psychic / mediumistic context in-depth, in order to question the use of such terms, whilst celebrating the benefits of creativity for wellbeing.
Working mainly on paper, card and textiles, Gill used pen to create maze-like surfaces with a glittering, almost hallucinatory quality that often reveal a female face. Ranging from postcard size to over 10 metres long, her work immerses the eye in a dark world of mystery, beauty and obsession. Her work has been included in previous Orleans House Gallery Outsider and Visionary art exhibitions, the Tate Gallery, and more recently at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Museum of Everything and Nunnery Gallery.
The focal point of the exhibition is The Crucifixion of the Soul, perhaps Gill’s most important work. Over ten metres long, this immense calico is inscribed with Gill’s finely wrought doodle-like drawings and is testament to Gill’s commitment to creativity.
The project has been generously funded by a People Award from the Wellcome Trust. Curators have worked with psychologists, medical historians, biographers, art historians and art psychotherapists to bring different approaches to Gill together within the exhibition and accompanying catalogue. Present day artists from the Art & Soul group, who celebrate mental and emotional wellbeing through the arts, are also represented in the project.
Bringing together little-seen loans from the Newham Archive; the College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington; the Henry Boxer Gallery and other archival material and artworks from private collections, this exhibition is a must-see for all those interested in art, psychology, spiritualism, social history or all of the above.
Orleans House Gallery, Riverside, Twickenham, TW1 3DJ
Free admission
Gallery open Tuesday-Saturday 1.00-4.30pm, Sunday 2.00-4.30pm
Tel: 020 8831 6000
Email: artsinfo@richmond.gov.uk
Thanks, Mark. I popped in for this last week. Dotty, wacky, all of that. But I did enjoy it. The trapped women’s faces reminded me a bit of the victims stored up in the sticky stuff in Alien/Aliens!