Richard Dadd

This one is an art episode, but also a murder episode and also a madness episode. Artist Richard Dadd's life story is quite sad, but his art remained consistently good, even at the lowest points in his life.

Research:

• Boyce, Niall. “Ehibition: Richard Dadd—Painting From His Mind’s Eye.” The Lacet. January 22, 2011. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2811%2960065-2
• “The Cobham Park Murder.” The Examiner. Sept 9, 1843. https://www.newspapers.com/image/388277729/?match=1&terms=richard%20dadd
• Dadd, Richard. “Halt in the Desert.” British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1987-0411-9#object-detail-data
• Dadd, Richard. “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke.” Tate Museum. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dadd-the-fairy-fellers-master-stroke-t00598
• Hall, Samuel Carter. “The Book of British Ballads.” J. How. 1842. Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=Tm8sFMykgdgC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
• Hare, Edward. “Creativity And Mental Illness.” British Medical Journal (Clinical Research Edition), vol. 295, no. 6613, 1987, pp. 1587–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/29529224
• Huddleston, S., & Russell, G. A. (2015). Richard Dadd: The Patient, the Artist, and the “Face of Madness.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 24(3), 213–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/0964704X.2013.849077
• Kerley, P “Richard Dadd: The art of a 'criminal lunatic' murderer.” BBC News Magazine. Nov. 13, 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34722937
• Lippincott, Louise. “Murder and the Fine Arts; Or, a Reassessment of Richard Dadd.” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, vol. 16, 1988, pp. 75–94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4166579
• Munn, Geoffrey. “New Light on Dadd: George Bailey (1821–1898)by Richard Dadd (1817–86).” The British Art Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 2023, pp. 75–76. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48760525
• “The Murder of Mr. Dadd – Apprehension of Richard Dadd.” Chester Chronicle, and Chester and North Wales General Advertiser. Sept. 15, 1843. https://www.newspapers.com/image/793241104/?match=1&terms=richard%20dadd
• “The Parricide at Cobham Park.” Essex, Herts and Kent Mercury. Sept 19, 1843. https://www.newspapers.com/image/933363283/?match=1&terms=richard%20dadd
• “Richard Dadd.” Getty Museum. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103JS7
• “Richard Dadd painting to return to Bethlem Hospital after 170 years.” BBC. January 6, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64155941
• “The ‘Satanic’ in Newspaper Literature.” Leicester Chronicle. Sept. 16, 1843. https://www.newspapers.com/image/816920892/?match=1&terms=richard%20dadd
• Seifert, Ruth, et al. “Mad, Bad or Sad? Prison and Psychiatric Illness.” RSA Journal, vol. 147, no. 5490, 1999, pp. 112–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41378810
• "’Sketch of an Idea for Crazy Jane’ by Richard Dadd.” Bethlem Museum of the Mind. https://museumofthemind.org.uk/blog/sketch-of-an-idea-for-crazy-jane-by-richard-dadd
• “Top 20 finds on the Antiques Roadshow.” BBC. Sept. 19, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/antiques-roadshow-40/valuable
• Tromans, Nicholas. “Richard Dadd: the Artist and the Asylum,” D.A.P./Tate. 2011.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Hollley
Frye and I'm Tracy be Wilson. This is one that
I've had on my list for a minute, and it
got on my list for one reason because I didn't

(00:22):
know the whole story. And then it became a different story,
which is that I stumbled across a piece of art
by Richard Dad for reasons because it had come up
in the news last year, I believe, And then I
discovered the story behind him. Having already thought, oh, this
is an interesting person, I wished to do an artist

(00:42):
episode on him. So it is an artist episode, but
it is also a murder episode, and it is also
a madness episode. So we are talking about artist Richard Dad,
whose life story is quite a ride and quite sad,
so be worn there. There's some a good bit of
violence in here, as well as some issues of delusion.

(01:04):
If those are not enjoyable for you to hear about,
this one might not be for you. But if you're
like me and you find this utterly engaging, it's like
an on ramp to our Halloween time. I actually had
kind of thought that as I was reading through that line,
it was like, this feels almost like something that we
would do in October, but not quite. Nope. So Richard

(01:26):
Dad was born August first, eighteen seventeen in Chatham, Kent,
That's in England, born to Robert and Mary Anne Dad.
His father, Robert was a chemist and his maternal grandfather
was the well known shipwright Richard Martin. This younger Richard
was the couple's fourth child out of eleven and as

(01:48):
a boy, Richard attended King's School, Rochester, and he loved literature,
particularly Shakespeare, and from the time he was quite young
it was very obvious to everyone that he had a
natural talent for drawing. By the time he was a teenager,
Richard had started to really sketch with focus on the
path to becoming an artist. In eighteen thirty seven, Richard

(02:10):
was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts, where his
teachers all noted his skill as well as his gentle
and kind personality, and in his third year at art
school he won a medal for his life drawing. As
a young man, Richard seemed poised to become one of
the most prominent and perhaps even influential artists of England.
He and several other artists founded a group known as

(02:33):
the Clique. That group included such artists as William Powell Frith,
who would become known for his scenes capturing English life,
and Augustus Egg who was a friend of Charles Dickens
and painted images that were often historical or anecdotal, and
Henry Nelson O'Neill, who became known for his painting of

(02:53):
the Indian Rebellion of eighteen fifty seven. Dad was generally
seen as the leader of this group, or at least
the most talented of them. Their focus was on promoting
naturalistic art, and Richard really excelled at it. I will
note that in watching a couple of videos with English

(03:14):
art historians, they pronounce it the Clique, which I found
quite charming. In eighteen forty two Dad illustrated the book
of British Ballads by Samuel Carter Hall. And this is
a substantial project. It's a two hundred and thirty three
page book and about one third of that space is illustration,
including frames that he created for every page. So this

(03:36):
was really a lot of work on Dad's part. In
July of eighteen forty two, Sir Thomas Phillips contracted Dad
to accompany him on a grand tour of continental Europe,
then through Greece, into Turkey, over to Syria and into Egypt,
and then back to London. Phillips was the former mayor

(03:56):
of Newport and this, of course was all before people
could take photos of their travels, so he hired Dad
to capture the trip through sketches along the way. David Roberts,
a well known Scottish painter, was a friend of the
family and had recommended Richard for this job. This was
a pretty good gig. It was a way to see

(04:16):
some of the world and also get paid to do it.
The artist both loved and hated the trip for reasons
we will explain, but more than anything, it was a
trip that was life changing for Dad, and not in
a good way. Dad and Phillips were not really of
the same temperament when it came to travel. Whereas Phillips

(04:37):
was sort of working through the sites they visited as
a tourist, wanting to see things and then quickly move
on to the next, Dad wanted to linger. Since Phillips
also arranged it, presumably he had a greater sense of
the schedule where his dad was just trying to capture
what he saw, and he got frustrated because he felt
he wasn't given enough time to really sketch things as
fully as he would have liked. And then on long

(04:59):
horse journeys he wanted to stop and sketch because he
had difficulty sketching while he was riding, but his desires
were not prioritized. And then at night when they camped,
he found it was just too dark to do any
serious work. So this whole trip was just not what
he envisioned at all. In November of eighteen forty two,
the group spent time in Syria and Egypt, and this

(05:22):
was grueling travel. In December, Dad and Phillips were traveling
up the Nile River on a boat when Dad started
to behave oddly. He was described as having just a
huge change in his demeanor and personality. Dad started to
say things that were clearly delusional. He believed that the
Egyptian god Osiris had been communicating with him. At the time,

(05:46):
Phillips thought Richard was experiencing a sunstroke or heat exhaustion.
As a note, there are some other versions of what
happened with Dad at the end of this trip, at
the very end, and some of this suggests that it
was a more gradual change that got worse on the Nile,
and that it may have been brought about by drug
use during the journey. Even Dad said things like this

(06:09):
at various points, but in any case, by the end
of this trip, Richard definitely did not seem the same
as when he had started on the journey, and as
the group headed home through Europe, Dad continued to have
difficulty discerning reality from his delusions. He described feeling an
intense compulsion to kill the Pope when they were traveling

(06:31):
through Italy, but his fear of the Vatican Guard was
the only thing that kept him from it. Dad did
not make it back to London with the rest of
the Phillips party. He disappeared while they were all in Paris,
and then he returned to London on his own. When
Dad returned home, his odd behavior continued. He had a
rented room at seventy one Newman Street, Oxford Street and

(06:54):
started eating only a very limited diet. He would only
eat eggs and only ale, and it seems like he
was eating these eggs. Raw Newspaper reports state that the
floor of his room was covered with eggshells, and he
had huge quantities of eggs and ale on hand when
the room was later examined. Dad's strange behavior did not

(07:18):
go unnoticed, and his friends started to speak with his
father about getting him some help. And although Robert Dad
consulted with physicians and was advised that his son Richard
needed to be in a hospital, he decided that the
best thing for his son would be to go into
the country for a respite from the city, where he
could get plenty of fresh air and regain his health.

(07:38):
And there are some accounts that suggest that this trip
may have actually been Richard's idea, but in any case,
they secured rooms in a cottage and Cobbham, where they
had spent time earlier in Richard's life, and the night
of their arrival they had dinner at a public house
near those rooms. According to a waiter that worked at
the public house where they dined, whose name was John Adams,

(07:59):
the Dad's had stopped there inquiring about a place to
sleep first, and he had told them they had no beds,
but that he would check with a nearby cottage. Robert
Dad had told Adams that one bed would be fine
because Richard was his son. But Richard insisted that they
have two beds, and so Adams went away to make
these arrangements. He got two beds for them, and then

(08:19):
he came back to the inn and told the dads
that he had secured these lodgings. After dinner, Richard wanted
to go for a walk, but Robert said he had
walked enough that day. He ordered a whiskey and a water,
and his son left. Robert and the waiter Adams chatted
for a little while, and then Richard returned. At about
eight forty five pm. Adams left the room to attend

(08:43):
to some work, and when he got back at nine thirty,
both of the men were gone. According to Adams, they
waited until twelve thirty for the men to return before
finally giving up and locking up the public house. Yeah,
it seems like because he had secured the rooms in
a cop and they hadn't gone there yet after dinner,
he was going to take them over there, so he

(09:04):
was waiting, but they never should back up. And apparently
at one point, as the two men went out walking
together after their dinner, the elder dad stepped away from
the path to urinate, and when he did, his son Richard,
attacked him. He first punched him in the head, and
then he stabbed him in the chest and cut his throat,

(09:24):
and according to his own account, Richard then shouted to
the sky, go and tell the great godd o Cyrus
that I have done the deed which is to set
him free. Coming up, we'll talk about what happened after
this murder, but first we will pause for a sponsor break.

(09:49):
On the morning following the murder, a butcher named Abraham
Lister was driving a buggy through Common Park with his nephew,
Charles Lister. This was about seven am, and the two
of them noticed a gentlemanly looking man lying in the
park on his face, with his arms over his head
and without his hat. He was about thirty yards away
from the road, so the Lister thought the man may

(10:11):
have been asleep or in distress, and they stopped to
check on him and offer assistance, but a prawn approach
saw that the body was covered in blood. They immediately
reported the find, calling on the constable, and this body
was soon identified as Robert Dad. A locked knife, a razor,
and Robert's hat were soon found near where the body

(10:32):
had been found. This Constable William Dawes, believed that Robert's
body had been dragged some distance, and also noted that
he had money and a gold watch still in his pockets.
The surgeon who performed a post mortem, named William Saunders,
reported to the coroner's jury that he had found an
incision on the left side of the throat, although it

(10:55):
wasn't big enough to have caused Robert's death. He also
noted bruce on the deceased's face and head, and a
number of small puncture wounds on the right thumb. The
lungs had been penetrated by a knife in two places.
He was confident that none of the wounds could have
been caused by Robert himself. After hearing testimony for several hours,

(11:18):
the coroner's jury declared this death to be a wilful murder. Initially,
after Robert's body was found, questions arose about whether someone
had attacked both father and son, and if Richard might
also be somewhere in the park dead. No one had
seen him since that waiter at the public house had
left him and his father in the dining room. Then

(11:41):
there was speculation that this may have been a murder
suicide scenario and that Richard may have gone elsewhere and
taken his own life, but that theory soon died down
as reports began to surface of other people who had
seen and interacted with him after Adams the Waiter. Additionally,
when Richard's room in London was searched, authorities found some

(12:03):
really troubling artwork that he had made. These artworks depicted
people in his life, family and friends, each of which
was shown with their throat slit. Richard became the prime
suspect in Robert Dad's murder. After this discovery, police put
out an internal notice that read quote description of Richard
Dad who was suspected of having murdered his father at

(12:25):
Cobham Park, Kent on the twenty eighth or twenty ninth,
twenty four years of age, five feet eight inches high,
dark hair, light blue eyes, thick, dark eyebrows, sallow complexion,
no whiskers, dressed in a dark blue frock coat, light
blue trousers. His linen marked Richard Dad or RD. Up

(12:47):
to the time of the murder, he resided at number
seventy one Newman Street, Oxford Street. Every exertion is to
be used for the apprehension of the individual in question.
Not long after, a bulletin went released to keep an
eye on railroad stations, and another that every police division
should start making inquiries at their local lodging houses. As

(13:09):
the manhunt for Richard got into full swing, Robert Dad
was buried at Gillingham Churchyard near Chatham, with Richard's brothers
in attendance. According to a newspaper account published a week later.
Immediately after the murder, Dad went to a tavern called
Soul's Arms. Tavern was popular with artists, and he asked

(13:29):
for a glass of water. According to the Chester Chronicle,
published on September fifteenth, eighteen forty three, quote, his extraordinary
appearance and excitement caused a remark from the barmaid that
she thought the young gentleman was not in his right mind,
which expression being overheard by him, he hurried from the house.

(13:50):
Richard made his way to Rochester and from there took
a carriage to the port at Dover. There, he stated
at the Ship Hotel while working to secure passage to Frances.
According to accounts from people who saw him there and
noted his disheveled state, he claimed that he had fallen
from a coach in an accident. He was noted as
carrying large amounts of cash, and he paid ten pounds

(14:13):
for his passage to Calais. In Calais, Dad was taken
to the passport office. He told officials there that he
was on pressing business. His passport was brand new, having
just been issued the week before, but it was valid
and he was sent on his way. He purchased new
clothes in Calais and left his old, bloody suit behind

(14:34):
at the hotel that was later seized as evidence. As
newspaper reports relayed the grizzly details of Robert's murder at
his son's hand, they offer up what's now a classic
description of the perpetrator that's actually become kind of a trope,
like this one in the Chester Chronicle quote, he has
always been considered as a young man of the most

(14:57):
mild disposition, and had ever exhibited fear links of the
warmest and most affectionate attachment to his father. The unfortunate
father was also devotedly attached to and proud of his son,
whose abilities as an artist are stated to be of
a very high order. Coverage of the murder was so
extensive that the Lester Chronicle included it in an editorial

(15:20):
that questioned whether newspapers had started to focus too much
on satanic topics instead of things like literature when there
isn't much political news. The article notes of Dad's story quote,
this is a rare specimen. The world heard little enough
of Richard Dad, the humble artist. But Richard Dad, the

(15:40):
patricide becomes at once a man of reputation, his career
worthy of a memoir, his artistic abilities of an essay,
and his productions of a place in the pictorial times.
Patricides are found to be a saleable commodity. Public patronage
is fished for an atroci murder, being employed as bait.

(16:03):
And as all of this was being hashed out in
the papers, the English and French authorities worked cooperatively on
Richard's case. This was not only because the French were
helping to apprehend the suspect. It was because he also
committed a violent crime in France and was arrested for it.
Richard was not planning to stay in France. He was

(16:23):
passing through it because he wanted to go to Vienna.
He believed that he needed to get to Austria and
assassinate Emperor Ferdinand the Ist, and as part of this journey,
he had boarded a stagecoach at Fontainebleau headed from Montreux.
But on this leg of the journey, Richard attacked one
of the other passengers and attempted to slit his throat.

(16:45):
Richard was quickly subdued and arrested, and his victim survived
the attack. Dad would later say that he had a
communication from ursa Major directing him to attack this man.
French newspapers ran an account of the attack claims made
by Dad. While in custody quote, it appears that the
young man states himself to be the son and envoy

(17:07):
of God, since to exterminate the men most possessed with
the demon. He relates with great coolness that in the
park of Lord Darnley he was seized being with him
who is said to be his father, with the divine
inspiration which commanded him to sacrifice him. So, in case

(17:28):
it's unclear from the somewhat stilted phrasing of that time period,
Richard thought the man he was with was not his father,
but was some sort of demonic presence pretending to be
or perhaps the physical body of his father, but in
a state of demonic possession. When French doctors asked Dad

(17:49):
how he felt about his actions, he stated that he
had done the right thing because he destroyed an enemy
of God. He similarly felt he must attack his felf
traveler as something commanded by a higher power. Incidentally, that
quote stating that he believed he was the son of
God actually makes this belief a little unclear, because he

(18:11):
didn't believe he was the son of the Christian God,
which the paper's readers likely assumed. Dad thought he was
the son of the Sun, as in the center of
the solar system. His delusion wasn't as simple as that,
though he would later say he was the son of
the Egyptian god Osiris, sent to the Earth to cleanse

(18:31):
it of demons. One of the interesting points of news
coverage as Richard's arrest in Paris was covered was what
was going to happen to him and how things would
be handled between England and France. As we said, the
two countries were cooperating, but they had to decide how
to proceed with his charges in both France and England.
But as the Essex Hertz and Kent Mercury noted in

(18:54):
its coverage quote, should he, however, be dispatched to this country,
there is not a doubt that his relatives will be
spared the distress attending a public examination, with the understanding
that they will immediately adopt measures for his safe keeping
in the lunatic asylum. Since Dad had confessed to murdering
his father, French authorities held him in an asylum while

(19:17):
decisions were made about how to handle the case. French
doctors declared him homicidal and noted that Dad would stare
straight at the sun for long periods of time without blinking.
Richard was prescribed cold water bats as part of his therapy,
which did not improve his condition. After several months in France,
he was sent back to England and that made him

(19:39):
the first person ever extradited between the two countries. We'll
talk about Dad's life after he returned to England after
we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed
in history class going As mentioned in the papers that

(20:02):
we read from earlier, British authorities did not put the
Dad family through a trial. There was a brief hearing
and then on August twenty second, eighteen forty four, Dad
was committed to Bethlum Hospital, So this is the same
Bethlum that has come up on the show before. It
had the nickname Bedlam because of its terrible reputation regarding

(20:22):
the treatment of its patients, but it had been rebuilt
in the eighteen teens and it was considered quite a
bit reformed, although it still had problems and because of
his violent past, Dad was sent to the criminal ward
Though Richard Dad was cut off from the outside world.
After he was allowed art materials by the warden, he

(20:43):
continued to sketch and paint, often working from memory and
also using the staff at the hospital as models. Even
for women. He would use men there as stand ins
to do his figure work. He also sometimes used his
fellow patients as models. The staff at Bethlum often encouraged
him in his work, and they even commissioned art from

(21:03):
him from time to time. Some of these works depict
events in the place of Shakespeare, even occasionally writing lines
from the plays at the bottom of the works are
on the back. Several of these focus on instances of
violence or murder in the place, such as one titled Hatred,
which depicts Henry the Six being killed by Richard of Gloucester.
He also drew from classic literature and biblical stories for inspiration,

(21:28):
including a watercolor of Cain. Just after his murder of
Abel titled Murder. In eighteen fifty five, Dad created one
of his most famous works called Sketch of an Idea
for Crazy Jane. I shows a character from a folk
ballad titled Poor Crazy Jane, who goes mad when her
lover abandons her. This sketch shows Jane in the foreground,

(21:52):
staring directly at the viewer, with her arms overhead, clutching
a switch with ribbons tied onto it, and looking as
though she may be dancing. She's bedraggled but not dirty,
and in the middle ground ravens fly overhead. In the
distant background, there's a castle. This is a striking image
for a number of reasons. It's a watercolor done almost

(22:14):
entirely in pale shades of blue gray and faint brown.
It also looks almost oddly modern. It would be right
at home in a modern goth or even manga inspired sketchbook. Yeah,
there is something about the shape of her face and
the furrow of her brow that I was like, this
looks like it literally looks like manga to me, like

(22:36):
prota manga. It's very interesting. Another work that he started
in eighteen fifty five and that really defines the painter's ouvre,
is The Fairy Feller's master Stroke, which was commissioned by
the hospital's head steward, George Hayden, and this painting features
Oberon and Titanya from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as
well as other fairies, but the rest of the fairies

(22:57):
are original characters created by da The Fairy Feller is
a character he's poised to cut open a chestnut that's
to be used in construction, presumably for a palace for
the Fairy Queen, and this is considered by many people
to be his masterpiece, and it has earned him the
nickname the Fairy Painter, although this particular work was never completed.

(23:19):
In eighteen fifty two, Bethleem had gotten a new superintendent,
William Charles Hood, who was interested in further reforming the facility.
He was also keenly interested in Dad's case. Dad wrote
out his entire account of what happened the night he
killed his father and gave it to Hood, but that
account has not survived Hood's notes on Dad half, though

(23:44):
on March twenty first, eighteen fifty four, Hood wrote quote,
for some years after his admission, he was considered a
violent and dangerous patient, for he would jump up and
strike a violent blow without any aggravation, and then beg
pardon for the This arose from some vague idea that
filled his mind and still does to a certain extent,

(24:06):
that certain spirits have the power of possessing a man's
body and compelling him to adopt a particular course, whether
he will or not. When he talks on this subject,
and on any other at all associated with the motive
that influenced him to commit the crime for which he
is confined here, he frequently becomes excited in his manner

(24:28):
of speaking, and soon rambles from the subject and becomes
quite unintelligible. He is very eccentric, and glories that he
is not influenced by motives that other men pride themselves
in possessing. Thus he pays no sort of attention to decency,
and acts or words if he feels the least inclination
to be Otherwise, he is a perfectly sensual, being a

(24:51):
thorough animal. But he also noted after describing some rather
gross behaviors that Dad was smart, educated and a gifted
artist and could be quite agreeable and enjoyable to talk to.
In eighteen fifty seven, Dad was moved out of the
criminal ward in Bethleem to an ordinary ward along with
three dozen other residents who had been determined to be

(25:14):
ready for a more homelike environment in the hopes that
it would benefit their well being. And this was one
of Woods's efforts at changing the way mental illness was managed.
And these new surroundings were much less hospital like and
more like a dormitory, and there were things like open
windows for natural light, and pets and a parlor where
the men could sit and converse. In eighteen sixty four,

(25:37):
construction was completed on the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in
Berkshire and Richard was transferred there. He had not had
any violent outbursts in years at that point and he
was transferred to this new facility even though it was
a criminal lunatic asylum. He continued to paint there, along

(25:58):
many of the same thematic lines that he always had.
He lived and painted at Broadmoor for twenty two years,
steadfastly and absolute certainty that his delusions were real. He
died there in January of eighteen eighty six of lung
disease and was buried on the asylum grounds. So while
Dad's story has inspired other artists and writers, you can

(26:21):
find mention of him in a lot of modern pop
culture things, in many ways he remains really inscrutable. Right.
We kind of buzzed through the last twenty two years
of his life because there's not a lot of specific
information other than paintings he made even while he was
still alive. Art dealers who may have had his paintings

(26:41):
pass through their hands often just went ahead and told
buyers he was deceased so that they wouldn't have to
explain that he was still being held in an asylum,
and because he didn't want to see visitors most of
the time. The only accounts that we have about his
years past eighteen forty three, so like more than four
years of his life, are from doctors who had assessed

(27:03):
and treated him, and this has led a lot of
modern doctors to debate over what mental illness he may
have had, but there's no sure way to know at
this point. There are entire papers written about kind of
building a case file around his what we do know
about him, but without him here to actually have a
current assessment, it's all guesswork. Even Dad's last painting, which

(27:26):
is a portrait of a man, remains something of a mystery.
For a long time, many believed that this was a
painting of the head of Broadmoor, a man named doctor
William Orange who had taken over there in eighteen seventy.
It's a very beautiful and detailed painting, But then photographs
of doctor William Orange surfaced and it became a parent

(27:47):
that that painting was probably misidentified because it doesn't look
like him. Dad's works have been shown in exhibitions fairly
frequently over the years. They're often included in shows that
are curated with an eye to examining the relationship between
art and mental illness or institutional experiences. People frequently point
out how figures in some of his paintings look like

(28:10):
his father or other specific people in his life, including
the staff of both Bethlem and Broadmoor. One of Dad's
works during his institutionalized life was a portrait labeled sketch
of Mister George Bailey by Richard Dad August thirteenth, eighteen
fifty five, Bethlehem Hospital, London. George Bailey was an attendant

(28:31):
at Bethlum. He was born in eighteen twenty one, so
he was four years younger than the artist, and he
had been working at the facility since he was twenty
eight in eighteen forty eight, so this means he was
there at a time when some reforms had been made,
but before William Charles Hood became superintendent, and then he
was there as Hood further changed the way residents were

(28:52):
cared for. So these two men, Bailey and Dad would
likely have seen a lot of each other, as Jeffrey
Munn noted in an article about Dad and Bailey for
British Art Journal in twenty twenty three, Bailey was transferred
to Broadmoor for his job, just six months before Richard
moved there. The Bethlum facility is now the Imperial War

(29:12):
Museum at It includes a Museum of the Mind, which
features quote portraiture by and of people suffering from mental illness.
Dad's work is included in the collection. A work Dad
painted while at Bethlum, called Portrait of a young Man,
is on loan to Bethlum from the Tate. There are
other works of art from him in that collection, but

(29:34):
that one just last year got loaned by the Tate
to be part of it. I could be misremembering, but
I feel like there are works by Louis Wayne in
the same I would not be surprised at all. Yeah.
Adding to the mystery of Dad's story is that a
number of works he is documented as having painted are
nowhere to be found. They just kind of vanished at

(29:54):
various points in time, often when they were on loan
for exhibitions. One of them, it's titled Halt in the Desert.
It goes by a couple other names as well, was
painted in eighteen forty five after he had been at
Bethleem for a couple of years, and he painted this
work from sketches and notes that he made while traveling
with Sir Thomas Phillips when they had to travel at

(30:15):
night across the Eemeddy in Israel, which is west of
the Dead Sea. This is a very striking night scene
in watercolor, showing the group stopped to make camp for
the night. A man named Thomas Birchall owned Halt in
the Desert in the eighteen fifties. He loaned it to
an exhibition in Manchester in eighteen fifty seven and then

(30:35):
to another exhibition in London in eighteen sixty two, and
then the painting just dropped off off all records. It's
not as though it was believed to be stolen. There
just wasn't tracking in place for it, so it's whereabouts
were a mystery until nineteen eighty six, and then a
couple brought a painting they had in their family loft
at Barnstable to the Antiques road Show to see if

(30:57):
it was worth anything, and it was halt in the
desert expert Peter Nay, who valued the work at one
hundred thousand pounds, which is what the British Museum paid
to acquire it, and now it remains part of the
British Museum collection. It's just one of the many ways
that Dad continues to pop up and surprise people. I'm
hoping that some of these other works. There were two

(31:18):
other works that had been loaned by Birchall to that
London collection, and I think they also kind of vanish
from the record at the same time, so they may
still be out there in someone's family home somewhere. That's
Richard dad who breaks my heart. Yeah, and fascinates me.

(31:38):
It's one of those things where overwhelmingly people who are
experiencing delusions aren't violent and aren't a danger to other people.
But he was also living in a time when there
was no way to actually treat like the root cause
of any delusion. The cold water bath thing was not

(31:59):
go do it good. Yeah, yeah, and I mean it
can like there are treatments and pharmaceuticals and things today
which can like try to resolve some of the delusional
and like that just it wasn't that didn't exist at
the time. It was not an option. Yeah. We'll talk
about it some more in the behind the scenes on Friday.

(32:21):
But one of the there was a phrase that stuck
out in one of the articles or books I was
reading about him that mentioned specifically that part of it,
given all of the things you just said about there
not being a lot of treatment, was that he had
such a complex layered religious delusion that even in terms

(32:41):
of something like talk therapy, it was hard for people
to like pluck out a thread and go with it
because he would have wedged in something that didn't really
make any sense to someone that knows any of those
religions that was, you know, like they just didn't know
how to even approach discussing it with him. So it's very,

(33:01):
very heartbreaking. It's one of those He's one of those
people where I feel like if he had existed today
and the same thing had happened, We're on a trip.
He had this whatever happened to him, whether that was
you know, a sunstroke that caused a sort of mental
issue or some sort of break, and he got back
to London and everyone told his parents he really needs
a lot of help. He may have ended up getting

(33:24):
help and being a very prolific artist that you know,
doesn't kind of fall off the historical radar. So that's
why he breaks my heart. I love looking at his
work because he really talented. Since this one is so sad,
I have two listener males that are pretty brief, pretty light,

(33:44):
pretty fun, and they have something in common which I
was like, why have we not had this before? Okay,
this is from our listener Megan or Megan, I'm not
sure how you pronounce it. Who writes Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I have been a fan for years, complete with a
missed in history PhD. I've wanted to write in for
years to tell you how wonderful I think you both are.

(34:05):
Your recent episode on Perms finally gave me an excuse
to write an email. As a person born in the
late eighties, my naturally thick and curly hair has been
out of fashion my entire life. Okay, Holly fry aside,
If you look at history, curly hair has been popular
more often than straight hair, So she's just you know, historically.
Writing away, Megan continues hearing about a time when perms,

(34:28):
where the end thing is always amusing. For me, I
spent most of my young life flattening it and using
all the products to try and make it straight and
easier to manage. In the last decade plus, I gave
up and embraced the curly lifestyle. I bet your curly
hair is beautiful. The thing I never knew about curly
hair was that the follicle shape and orientation is what
makes it curly. Having lived with curly hair my entire life,

(34:49):
I miss this little thing that I find fascinating now
that I know it. I'm so excited that we are
soon going to be in spooky season, as the October
episodes are frequently my favorites. I saw you in October
a fe years ago in Denver and would like to
request another tour N eight in Colorado. Please. Attached is
my pet tax widget is my distinguished bearded poodle dude
and two of my favorite geckos, Galactica the gargoyle gecko

(35:12):
and Molder the Dalmatian spotted crested gecko. Okay, let's break
down this pet situation. HM. Widget is so cute. I
would approve him for a credit card. That beard makes
him look very smart and very capable, and like he
would manage his money in a very good way. Like seriously,
I've told you guys, I have poodle fever lately. I'm

(35:32):
not going to get a dog. My life is not
conducive to it right now. But I do love poodles,
and I don't know that we've gotten geckos before, but
these babies are beautiful. Yeah, I love geckos. I have
a lot of friends over the years that have had them.
I feel like I'm scared to ever have them because

(35:52):
I feel like I always hear that they're kind of delicate,
and I worry that I would do something wrong and
never forgive myself. I also want to mention another listener
mail because our listener Cheryl also wrote and sent a
picture of a gecko named Desdemona. Well, I'm like, is
it gecko season? What's happening? I love it? And Cheryl

(36:17):
just writes, very simply, I love listening to your podcast,
especially behind the scenes, and here are my babies for
pet Tax and so Tesdemona is very cute. She's a
very sweet expression. And then there are some birds, some beautiful,
very sweet looking birds. So I just loved it. It
seemed like a confluence of geckos, and I didn't want

(36:40):
to let that go unnoted. So thank you to both
of you for sharing geckos with us. I love it.
I love a new pet zone in our behind the
scenes and in our pet Tax photos, So keep those coming.
Anything that you have is great. Don't feel bad if
you only have dogs and cats, we love those too.
If you would like to write to us share your
animal pictures, you can do that at History Podcast at

(37:03):
iHeartRadio dot com. I just forgotten the email that I've
said a million times. You can also subscribe to the
show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit

(37:24):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
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