Richard Dadd 1817-1886

George Henry Haydon, Steward of Bethlem Hospital, by whom given to Mr Shields in c.1880;
By descent to Arthur E. Shields;
J. Bomford (1949);
Tom Laughton (to 1964);
Sotheby's, London, 18 March 1964, lot 41, where bought by the present owner

London, Leicester Galleries, The Victorian Romantics, 1949, no.65;
London, Agnew's, Loan Exhibition: Victorian Painting 1837-87 (in aid of the Victorian Society), 1961, no. 47 as 'The Gardener';
Sheffield City Art Galleries, Victorian Painting, September - November 1968, no. 31 as 'The Gardener';
Kingston upon Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Collectors' Choice, 1970, no. 48;
London, Tate Gallery, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974 (later shown under the auspices of the Arts Council at Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Municipal Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; and Bristol City Art Gallery, 1984-5), no.189;
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974-75, no. 189

Graham Reynolds, Painters of the Victorian Scene, 1953, p.56, repr. fig.16;
John Rickett, 'Richard Dadd, Bethlem and Broadmoor', in Ivory Hammer, The Year at Sotheby's, II, 1964, p.27, repr. p.25;
David Greysmith, Richard Dadd - The Rock and the Castle of Seclusion, 1973, pp.80, 185, pl. no.105;
Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, 1974, cat. no. 189, repr. p.124;
Patricia Allderidge, Richard Dadd, 1974, p.101, cat. no. 28, repr. p.39

Richard Dadd’s strange but fascinating work The Gardener shows the family home of the poet Alexander Pope at Binfield, west of Windsor in Berkshire. The part of the house seen in the painting, built in the sixteenth century, had its main entrance in a gabled end and was constructed of typical Berkshire red brick and with a timber frame. Lattice windows with leaded divisions are shown, as well as an ornamental chimney and a brick outhouse. A classical façade of five bays was added early in the eighteenth century. Although having stood for some years in an abandoned state, the house – now called Pope’s Manor – still stands.

Alexander Pope’s father was a successful linen-trader, who converted to Roman Catholicism. Because of anti-Catholic feeling, the family moved from the city of London, where his son Alexander had been born in 1688, first to Hammersmith and then, in about 1700 to Binfield. Largely self-educated and suffering a spinal disease that stunted his growth, Alexander Pope remained at Binfield until the age of about twenty-eight. The Berkshire countryside inspired Pope’s early poetic work, for example his long Windsor Forest (1713), a poem which combines topographical descriptions with political and historical musings and which reflects his Tory sympathies.

It has been suggested that Dadd based his view of the house in The Gardener on an engraved plate in Thomas Dugdale’s England and Wales, delineated, the set of eleven volumes of which was published in 1846, although with various adaptations and adjustments of the architectural forms and the overall perspective of the building (see Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, (hereafter referred to as Tate 1974), p.124, for a reproduction of the engraving). However, Dadd departed from the engraving in the treatment of the garden, in which he paid particular attention to details of plants and figures; a gardener is shown carrying a spade and a rake, and with a watering-can and his a dog, and on the right side of the composition an elegantly dressed couple walk among sunflowers, roses and potted plants. Although the figures are represented in contemporary dress, perhaps the importance of the motif of the garden is intended as a reference to Alexander Pope’s own love of plants and their cultivation, and his creation of picturesquely ornamented gardens.

As Patricia Allderidge pointed out in 1974, the figure of the gardener closely resembles Dadd’s father, who the painter himself had murdered in 1843, the event which led to his admittance to an asylum at Clermont. As Allderidge goes on to suggest, there may have been some deliberate intention in placing a figure representing his father in conjunction with sunflowers, as at the time of the patricide Dadd may have become obsessed with images of the sun. The governor of the asylum in Clermont where he was admitted for a period after his flight to France described how Dadd appeared to have no memory of his former life, but would simply stand in the courtyard of the hospital staring at the sun which ‘he calls his father’ (quoted Allderidge, Tate 1974, p.26). During his lifetime Dadd's mania or monomania (which would probably now be diagnosed as paranoid scizophrenia) was said to have been triggered by a case of sun-stroke suffered during a trip to explore Palestine and Egypt in 1842. Whether any deliberate association or private symbolism invoking the sun and the representation of sunflowers was intended can only be a matter of speculation.

Dadd’s The Gardener can be dated to the early 1860s, or in any case prior to mid-1864, on the grounds that it must have been painted at Bethlem Hospital in London, because it came into the possession of G.H. Haydon who was Steward there. In about 1880 Haydon gave it to a Mr Shields, whose family business supplied the hospital with furniture. On 23 July 1864 Dadd was transferred to the newly-built Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, which happens coincidentally to be only about five miles from Binfield.

A further possibility is that Dadd’s representation of the house in which Alexander Pope lived was intended as a tribute to the poet, whose works he may have read in the asylum. Since the early 1850s attempts had been made at the instigation of the hospital's governors to eventually make the lives of the prisoners more pleasant, by providing them with useful activities and intellectual stimulation. These reforms were conducted by Dr William Charles Hood, who was appointed as Resident Physician at Bethlem in 1852. Shortly afterwards a ward of the hospital was dedicated for the use of the ‘better class’ of patients, 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, and describing 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 and would, it is thought, have pre-eminently excelled had circumstances not opposed’ (quoted Rickett 1964, p.28). It may have been Thomas Dugdale’s books which provided the immediate pictorial inspiration for the present painting, but also perhaps to works of poetry which may have made him want to know more about the setting in which Alexander Pope had led his early life. However Dadd was very well educated and continued to read both classical and English poetry throughout his life, therefore it is possible that Dadd was already aware of Pope's work. The artist William Powell Frith, whom Dadd had known in his student years, was an admirer of Pope's work and painted a scene from his life.

The painting is richly coloured, with particular delight taken in the contrast between the blue of the sky, marked with strands of the clouds; the green of the foliage of the tree and garden vegetation; and the reds of the walls. A deliberate and slightly jarring motif is the colour contrast between the purple brown reds of the bricks and the poster red of the woman’s cape. All is painted with a close attention to detail, with each quarry of glass in the windows reflecting the light at a slightly different angle, and with variations in the colours of the bricks. Although Dadd can have had no knowledge of the work of contemporary landscape painters such as George Price Boyce, who were then giving comparably close attention to historical and vernacular architecture, he may have seen engraved reproductions or had a memory of earlier painters of landscape and urban subjects, such as for example the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan van der Heyden, whose works were much admired in the mid-nineteenth century and who was famous for his meticulous depiction of brickwork.

The Gardener was part of the remarkable collection formed in the post-war years by Tom Laughton. He also owned the extraordinary oval Contradiction: Oberon and Titania. The Gardener was purchased by its present owner, along with Contradiction (subsequently sold, and now in the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber) at Sotheby’s in 1964.
CSN

We are grateful to Patricia Allderidge for her kind assistance with this catalogue entry.