In 1841, he received a commission to do the woodblock illustrations for a book called the Book of British Ballads, as well as an oil painting called Titania Sleeping, which is perhaps the best example of his early work. Dadd was considered a gifted painter in Victorian England during the stylistic phase now referred to as "The Fairy School".
        The Victorians were obsessed with fairy lore, and much of the art of this period reflects this. Their fascination can be attributed to several things, chief among them perhaps being the effort to rediscover their folkloric past; an emergent spiritualist movement, as witnessed by the founding and flourishing of such groups as the Masons, the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society.
         In June 1842, Dadd and his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips, left England to travel extensively in the Middle East and Europe. Things were going well until Dadd, in Egypt, encountered a group of old Arab men smoking an Arabic style water pipe. Dadd joined them and spent five days and nights smoking the bubbling pipe. Dadd became convinced that the sound of the bubbling was a special form of communication. By the fifth day, he had deciphered a message, which he believed was from the Ancient Egyptian god Osiris.
         After this encounter, Dadd began to suffer from persistent headaches and odd behavior. In Rome, Dadd expressed a near uncontrollable urge to attack the Pope during a public appearance. Dadd left Phillips and returned to England, where his family had a physician specializing in mental illness examine him. The doctor found him to be legally not of sound mind. Dadd convinced his father that all he needed was a rest, and together they traveled to a country village called Cobham. It was in a forested area just outside of Cobham, that Richard Dadd brutally murdered his father.
         Dadd immediately fled to France, not even changing his bloodstained clothing until his arrival in Calais. Dadd was arrested and sent to England for trial and was committed to the famous insane asylum known as Bedlam, at age 27.
         Dadd was diagnosed with what is now known as bipolar manic depression, an unfortunate illness that has only in the past few decades been understood and well treated. Fortunately, in the asylum, the doctors encouraged him to continue painting and Richard Dadd had entered a new era in his painting career. It was here that he executed such masterworks as Fairy Feller's Master Stroke.
         Dadd's later paintings have a multilayered detail that takes hours to appreciate. What is unfortunately lost in reproduction is the true three dimensionality of canvas, a case of subject and technique being perhaps a little too intimately intertwined.
Dadd stayed in Bedlam for almost 20 years, later transferred to another asylum called Broadmoor, where he remained for the rest of his life, dying at age 69 from "acute
lung disease".
         Would we have remembered Richard Dadd, had he not gone insane and murdered his father? Most likely not. Like the Marquis de Sade, who spent the final years of his life in an asylum, the institution allowed him to explore his internalized passions to their fullest. In the institution, Dadd, had no models to work from, only his memories. The painted world became the real one, much like the Marquis with his writings. It was truly his insanity, not for the notoriety it gave him, but the intensity of focus it allowed, that made him great.