Mother and Child (Madonna and Child) (1860) Richard Dadd
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke (1855-64)
Now, we all know Richard Dadd (1817-1886). He's the chap who went to the Middle East and came back and killed his father who he believed was the devil. He then spent the rest of his life in either Bedlam (St Bethlehem's Hospital) or the newly-built Broadmoor. The majority of his art that we know is from his incarceration, and all of it is tinged with an otherness.Richard Dadd, painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854-8)
Dadd's mother died when he was just seven years old and you wonder if he had an idealized view of her. Not only that but his father remarried quite quickly after the death of his first wife and had two more children with wife number 2, who also died a few years later, leaving Richard Dadd bereft of two mothers before he was barely a teenager.Crazy Jane (1885)
So what to make of Dadd's Madonna and child? The mother seems a monumental figure, literally glowing with goodness, more than capable of holding the tiny child. For heaven sake, the sun is coming out of the top of her hat, you can't get much more holy than that. Just one question, what on earth is that on the wall behind them?See you tomorrow...