Portrait of Mr. George Bailey

Richard Dadd

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

By his mid-twenties Dadd was recognized as the promising leader of a group of young British artists, but an arduous journey to the Middle East in 1842 led to a mental breakdown. Shortly after returning to England, the artist succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia and murdered his father, then spent the rest of his life confined to institutions. Over the next four decades, he painted masterly, hyper-realistic fairy pieces, mysterious representations of the passions, and portraits of staff members at Bethlem and Broadmoor hospitals. Here he portrays George Bailey, who worked at Bethlem. Dadd had been at that hospital for eleven years in 1855, and settled into a routine that allowed him to produce some of his most famous works. Here, the artist's facility with watercolor is evident and, while the subject's expression is unsettling, the work contains none of the puzzling details found in Dadd's imaginative compositions.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art