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A CASTLE ON A CLIFF OVERLOOKING A LAKE

38 by 48.5 cm., 15 by 19 ¼ in.

watercolour

PROVENANCE

D.P. Clifford;
Sotheby's, London, 7 April 1965, lot 78;
J.S. Steward, 1973;
Sotheby's, London, 22 November 1983, lot 44;
Private collection

EXHIBITED

On loan to Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, 1975-83

LITERATURE

David Greysmith, Richard Dadd, New York, 1973, pp.88 and 185, reproduced as plate 108 (reversed);
Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1974, p.141, catalogue no.236.

NOTE

This appears to be one of the series of imaginary landscapes that Dadd painted in the early 1860s as an inmate of the criminal lunatic asylum at Bethlem Hospital, where he had been placed following his murder of his father in 1843.

In 1852 Dr William Charles Hood was appointed as physician superintendent at Bethlem, immediately inaugurating reforms in the treatment of patients and improvements to the building to make conditions more pleasant. In 1857 a ward of the hospital was dedicated for the use of the 'better class' of prisoners, where they could enjoy some seclusion. A grant of £100 was made by the government to provide books, and pictures and statues were also introduced. Hood took a particular interest in Dadd, recognising his technical skills and extraordinary imagination as an artist, providing him with working materials, and encouraging him to work by acquiring works from him. Hood described his patient as 'a very sensible and agreeable companion, and [one who could] shew in conversation a mind once well educated and thoroughly informed in all the particulars of his profession in which he still shines ...' (quoted, Allderidge, op. cit., p.30). Hood's kindness towards Dadd, and the practical assistance that he gave during the long years of incarceration, permitted various of the most remarkable works of art by any painter of the nineteenth century to be made.

Among the works painted by Dadd at Bethlem were the extraordinary works of fantasy of which Contradiction -- Oberon and Titania (private collection) and The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (Tate Gallery) are the most famous. Other works are serene and abstracted, gentle and dreamlike, as if the artist was searching into the inner reaches of his own visionary imagination for images of peacefulness and calm. The range and variety of the different types of work undertaken is in itself indicative of the fluctuations of the artist's mental state.

Castles and rocky crags of the type seen in the present watercolour occur on several occasions in the artist's work as a landscapist, for example in the drawing entitled Port Stragglin (British Museum), of 1861. As Patricia Allderidge has pointed out, such a prominent motif may be intended as a symbol of his own isolation in an impregnable fortress (see op. cit., p.119). At the same time, the topography shown must have derived from Dadd's memories of places visited in his earlier life, perhaps mountain scenery seen in Switzerland in 1842 in the course of the journey he made as part of the party of Sir Thomas Phillips and which travelled on to Egypt and Palestine. The river or estuary that runs across the composition may have been prompted by Dadd's memory of the Thames Estuary at Chatham, where he had lived as a child. A further possible inspiration for the main elements of the landscape may have been the types of rocky hillside crested with towers and fortifications and often skirted with trees which Dürer introduced to various of his engravings, for example that in the background of Sea Beast and Woman, of 1496 (see Fig.1). Dadd may have had access to reproductions of such prints, or perhaps remembered them from the years before his imprisonment.

CSN