Image: Richard Dadd, The Artist’s Halt in the Desert, c. 1845. Watercolour and bodycolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence
A Richard Dadd watercolour that had sat unrecognised in a Devon attic entered the British Museum's collection in 1987, and it is on public view again as one of the loans to ‘Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam’ at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which the Royal Academy calls the artist's biggest retrospective for half a century and which runs until 25 October 2026. The Royal Academy's newsletter has revived the story of the find; the acquisition itself is thirty-nine years old.
The work is ‘The Artist's Halt in the Desert’, watercolour and bodycolour, made about 1845 and measuring 368 by 707 mm. The British Museum's catalogue entry, registration number 1987,0411.9, gives an acquisition date of 1987 and records that the drawing was acquired after it was shown on the BBC's ‘Antiques Roadshow’. The museum lists the purchase as a private treaty sale made through the dealers Somerville & Simpson Ltd, acting for Mr and Mrs H. Walker of Fremington, near Barnstaple, with a 50 per cent contribution from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The £100,000 figure comes from the Royal Academy's account; the museum publishes no price. The Royal Academy names the owners as Bob and Pauline Walker of Barnstaple.
By the Royal Academy's telling, the couple remembered the picture after noticing that Antiques Roadshow was filming close to the park where they walked their dog, and took it in to be examined without knowing what they had.
The sheet was not unknown to the Victorians. The British Museum's curatorial note records that it has also gone under the titles ‘Encampment’ and ‘Moonlight in the desert’, and that the Preston lawyer and collector Thomas Birchall lent a ‘Halt in the Desert’ to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857 and to London's International Exhibition in 1862, where a critic found in it a “wild feeling, one hardly knows whether more poetical or insane”. Two other Dadd watercolours Birchall lent in 1857 remain untraced.
Dadd made the watercolour in about 1845 while a patient at Bethlem Hospital, to which he had been committed in 1843 after killing his father. It looks back on the expedition he made in 1842, before his mental health deteriorated, with his patron Sir Thomas Phillips, through Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestine and Egypt. The museum reads the scene as the party bivouacked by the Dead Sea for two hours after sunset before continuing through the mountains, with Dadd himself seated at the far right of the camp fire. He inscribed the verso in French, locating the spot between the Jordan and the mountains on the road to St Sabre. His sketchbook from the journey is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The British Museum currently lists the drawing as not on display in Bloomsbury and enters the Royal Academy exhibition, 25 July to 25 October 2026, in the object's exhibition history. Earlier appearances there include the museum's own Recent Acquisitions display in 1991, British Orientalist Painting at the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain in 2008, and ‘Richard Dadd: The Art of Bedlam’ at the Watts Gallery, Guildford, in 2015.
