We sometimes forget that Victorian art was the contemporary art of its day, radical, controversial, surprising and sometimes highly individual. I was reminded of this whilst enjoying the superb summer exhibition at the Royal Academy, Richard Dadd – Beyond Bedlam. The 85 exhibits presented over half a dozen rooms gave us insights not only into the art of more than a century ago, but also into the fascinations, torments and passions of a man who was psychologically troubled – sadly, it is that element of mental crisis that was woven through the whole exhibition.

It is easy for an artist and their work to simply be labelled “mad”. Perhaps it is unavoidable to think of Richard Dadd as the mad Dadd who murdered his dad. But this was only one tragic and violent part of his life. Although it marked a definitive turning point from which the brilliant and visionary artist became an incarcerated genius, he continued to paint pictures with the power at once to enchant and disturb. We see these works now through the lens of hindsight, in the knowledge of the patricide he committed on August 28, 1843. We can perceive something unsettling in the expressions of his fairies and goblins and the obsessive detail of almost everything he depicted.

The first room contained the artist’s early work, which established who Dadd was and what he wanted to achieve, namely to paint dramatic pictures – awkwardly executed – for the Royal Academy exhibitions. We then entered a world of fairies in moonlit grottos sparkling with dewdrops and sinister eroticism. Later in the exhibition we returned to this world in pictures of exquisite detail – The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania – paintings of unfathomable imagination that required lingering attention. If any pictures can reveal the inner self of an artist, these do and they show something that is beautiful and claustrophobic in equal measure...