Writers, and often the public, like to romanticize the connection between madness and art. From the emotional anguish of van Gogh to the physical violence of Caravaggio, there is a notion of the artist going to the brink, and over, and returning with visions from the other side that would be inaccessible to the normal mind.

Whether this is true is a matter of debate, and mental illness is hardly romantic, though in the case of Victorian Painter Richard Dadd, his most memorable works of ramantic fantasy were produced after he was committed to “Bedlam” (Bethlem Hospital) because of violent insanity.

Dadd descended into a state we would now call paranoid schizophrenia during a trip to Egypt and the middle east. After his return, he murdered his father, who he evidently believed was possessed by the devil, and fled to Paris, where he was arrested for assaulting another traveler, who he also perceived as possessed. Evidently there was a genetic predisposition to mental illness in his family.

Dadd was a painter whose images of fairies and other subjects from folklore and fantasy are part of a larger stylistic branch of Victorian painting dealing with these subjects, sometimes simply called the “Fairy School”. His pre-commitment paintings of the subject were open and airy; those created afterwards, for which he is most noted, are quite different, large scale, flattened in perspective and richly (or obsessively) detailed.

Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, shown here, is his most recognized work. Dadd worked on it for nine years and still considered it unfinished. He finally did stop working on it, however, and then produced a copy in watercolor (the original is in oil) and wrote a strange “guidebook” for the painting in verse.

It’s difficult to get any feeling for this painting from the tiny image here. There is a large version here, another large one here and a larger one here, that is unfortunately a bit dark.

Low resolution web versions still don’t convey the detail in the image, though. If you are interested you really should look for a reproduction in print. The one I have is in Victorian Painting by Lionel Lambourne (an excellent book, BTW). There are also books devoted to Dadd’s work. The World of Richard Dadd by Michael Mott is inexpensive and serves as a nice introduction.

By all accounts, though, you really can’t grasp this painting, which is in the Tate Gallery in London, until you see it in person (I haven’t), because of the dramatically three-dimensional nature of the application of the paint.

Dadd did many other paintings during the time he spent in the hospitals, and his work has been influential on fantasy painters from his own time through the present.

Unlike the French Impressionists, there was really no formal group that called themselves “American Impressionists”; this is a label writers have applied to American painters who adopted elements of Impressionist style and technique to their work.

There was however, “The Ten American Painters”, a group of painters from New York and Boston who withdrew from the Society of American Artists in protest of that group’s commercialism and restrictive styles, and devoted themselves to new styles of painting, largely influenced by French Impressionism. The group includes John Henry Twatchman, Edmund Charles Tarbell, William Merritt Chase and J. Alden Weir, among others.

One of the founding members of that group, and along with Tarbell and Chase, one of the most important of the painters referred to as “American Impressionists”, was Massachusetts painter Childe Hassam (pronounced “child HASS-em”).

Hassam started as an illustrator and worked primarily in watercolor. He went to Paris in search of a formal art education (as was common for American artists at the time) and studied oil painting at the Académie Julian. He later discounted that teaching but returned from Paris dramatically impressed (if you’ll excuse the expression) with the daring new style of those radical upstarts from the Salon de Refusés, the Impressionists.

His own work showed that influence in many ways, there are numerous paintings of flower gardens bursting with dabs of pure color, street scenes with finely dressed gentry awash in dappled sun and landscapes blanketed in brightly lit snow. But he also diverged in may ways from the Impressionist path.

His work would often dwell on themes of rain-drenched streets, late day sun and misty twilight, more in keeping with the muted whispers of Whistler’s nocturnes than the mid-day kaleidoscopic dazzle of Monet. He would break his color into rough chunks and patches, very different from the individual dabs of “pure color” favored by Impressionist theory, and explore the rich darks of room interiors, like his fellow member of “The Ten”, Edmund Tarbell.

Hassam was also a superb etcher, again more akin to Whistler than the Impressionists. There are excellent examples of his work in major museums in the US, particularly, as you might expect, on the East Coast.

Like the French Impressionists, the American Impressionists are popular subjects for publishers and there are numerous books on Hassam and his explorations of brilliant color and subtle light.