Portrait of Mr. George Bailey
Richard Dadd British
Sitter George Bailey British
Not on view
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 his mental breakdown. Shortly after returning to England in 1843, 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.
The bright lights and strong shadows in this watercolor indicate that Dadd painted it outdoors in August 1855, in the gardens at London's Bethlem Hospital, located south of the Thames in Southwark. By that date, the artist had begun to produce some of his most famous works, even while working within the unsettled environment of a lunatic criminal ward. His creativity was supported by a enlightened, reforming superintendent, Dr. William Charles Hood (1824-1870), who had arrived at Bethlem in 1852.
Little was known about the sitter, George Bailey, until a recent article by Geoffrey Munn revealed key details of his life and career. Bailey joined the hospital staff in 1848 as a twenty-seven-year-old unskilled attendant but, by the time Dadd painted him seven years later, he had matured into a skilled caregiver–his face and demeanor communicate calm competence but also hint at weariness. Both artist and sitter benefited from Hood's improvements at Bethlem, although it took five years for the superintendent to obtain permission to move incurable patients with educated backgrounds, such as Dadd, into more humane living quarters. In 1857, Dadd and fifty-nine others were rehoused in a new ward furnished with a library and well-lit common rooms decorated with art and greenery, and enhanced with bird song. Bailey was one of a select group chosen to attend these patients, men deemed "respectable...humane and intelligent," who also received significant pay raises. Munn describes Bailey as "a literate, Christian, family man...and, if Bethlem became a much happier place, he undoubtedly helped to make it so." In 1864, he would be promoted, to Principal Attendant and transferred to the new asylum at Broadmoor in Berkshire, then remain there until retirement in 1884. Five months after Bailey left London, Dadd also moved to Broadmoor and continued to paint there until his death in 1886. This record of a summer sitting in 1855 offers insights into the lives of two men, caretaker and artist-patient, who interacted across thirty-six years.
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