Madness and Fairies: The Royal Academy Revisits Richard Dadd

Few stories in British art are as strange as Richard Dadd's. A brilliant young Victorian painter, he descended into mental illness, killed his own father, and spent the rest of his life in Bethlem and Broadmoor asylums — where he produced his most extraordinary work.

The Royal Academy's 2026 exhibition gathers those obsessive, jewel-like fairy paintings, above all 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke', a tiny canvas packed with microscopic, dreamlike detail that took him years to complete.

It's a show about genius and torment in equal measure — proof that some of art's most hypnotic visions have emerged from its darkest corners.

Image: “Richard Dadd - The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke - Google Art Project” — Richard Dadd, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.