Richard Dadd’s Passions and the Treatment of Insanity

Richard Dadd, an academically trained young artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy, suddenly descended into madness in 1843 and murdered his father whom he believed to be an impostor. Dadd spent forty-two years in institutions for the criminally insane. During that time he was encouraged by his doctors to paint and continued to produce art work which included a large series, Sketches to Illustrate the Passions (1853–57). This article investigates how Dadd’s Passions both reflect and deviate from Victorian psychiatric theories of how the passions could be codified and used in moral therapy. The passions had long been a source of debate, and the playwright Joanna Baillie began a series of plays on the passions in 1798. She coined the term ‘sympathetic curiosity’ in order to explain the deep compulsion to peer into another’s soul in order to discern hidden passions. Sympathetic curiosity will be discussed as it relates to psychiatry, and also how it illuminates aspects of Dadd’s works. The Passions series problematizes the legibility that physicians attempted to achieve through photographing mental patients, and fundamentally reveals more about the larger society from which Dadd was barred than his own personal demons.