Portrait of Mr. George Bailey

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.