THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

And then he went mad.  Not just a little bit mad, but quite spectacularly mad; a murderous patricidal madness of demons and Egyptian gods.  He spent the rest of his life locked up – first in Bedlam, later one of the first prisoners in Broadmoor – and, after a while, he began to paint, trading his paintings for favours.  Gone were the chocolate box fairies.  Now there was an intensity to his paintings and drawings of fairy courts, of bible scenes, of his fellow inmates (real or imaginary), that makes those we have such treasures.  They were worked on with an intensity and single-mindedness that is, quite simply, scary.  He spent the rest of his life behid bars, locked up with the dangerously insane, as dangerously insane as any of them, but with a message for us from, as it were, the other side.

Neil Gaiman on Richard Dadd, Gaiman/Gaiman, 2002