Image: Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (detail), 1855–64. Oil on canvas, 54 x 39.4 cm. Tate. Presented by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War 1963. Photo: Tate
‘Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam’, described by the Royal Academy of Arts as the artist’s biggest retrospective for half a century, runs from 25 July to 25 October 2026 in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at Burlington House, London. The Royal Academy’s exhibition page states that it brings together more than 100 works, with admission at £15 and Friends of the RA admitted free. Among the loans is ‘The Artist’s Halt in the Desert’, the Dadd watercolour the British Museum acquired for £100,000 after it surfaced on ‘Antiques Roadshow’.
That discovery is not recent. The British Museum’s catalogue entry for the sheet — registration number 1987,0411.9, watercolour and bodycolour, c. 1845, 368 by 707 mm — gives an acquisition date of 1987 and records that it was acquired after the drawing was shown on the BBC’s ‘Antiques Roadshow’. The museum lists the purchase as a private treaty sale made through Somerville & Simpson Ltd, acting for Mr and Mrs H. Walker of Fremington, near Barnstaple in Devon, with a 50 per cent contribution from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
The Royal Academy’s newsletter retells the episode: the owners, named there as Bob and Pauline Walker of Barnstaple in Devon, had kept the work in their attic without knowing its significance, remembered it after noticing that ‘Antiques Roadshow’ was filming close to the park where they walked their dog, and took it in to be examined. It was then identified as a work by Dadd. The British Museum’s exhibition history for the watercolour confirms the current loan, listing the Royal Academy show for 25 July to 25 October 2026.
The exhibition’s published material places Dadd’s work alongside paintings including ‘Bacchanalian Scene’, 1862, oil on wood, 35.6 by 24.1 cm, lent by Tate from a private collection in 1993, and ‘Contradiction. Oberon and Titania’, 1854–58, oil on canvas, 61 by 75.5 cm, from a private collection. Also reproduced is ‘Subject from “Two Gentlemen of Verona”’, 1857, by the Royal Academician Alfred Elmore, a painting from the Royal Academy’s own collection.
The Royal Academy’s accompanying interpretation links Dadd’s paintings to later creative figures, stating that his work inspired disparate artists and “some of the great creative minds of the 20th century”, and naming the musician Freddie Mercury, the novelist Terry Pratchett and the comic-book writer Alan Moore. Its exhibition page adds that the band Queen took the title of a song from one of Dadd’s most celebrated paintings, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The show has also drawn strong newspaper notices, with the Financial Times calling it “near-psychedelic, inventive, technically dazzling” and The Spectator describing Dadd as “The Victorian Hieronymus Bosch”.
A related programme of talks, tours and events, ‘Richard Dadd in focus’, accompanies the exhibition. Separate Royal Academy courses include ‘Fairies and folklore: painting with watercolours and ink’, an in-person weekend course inspired by the fantastical works of Dadd and Shakespeare on Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September 2026, and ‘Shakespeare and art’, an in-person weekend programme on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 October 2026. ‘Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam’ is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, until 25 October 2026.
