Join us every month in the Clocktower Café for a relaxed, friendly discussion on an art-related book as part of a programme of events around our current exhibition: The Essex House Tapestries.
For our next session, we will be reading something a little bit different - Jennifer Higgie’s Bedlam: A Novel.
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About the book:
The strange and tortured mind of the Victorian artist and patricide Richard Dadd, a painter of fairies who spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals
Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England’s most notorious sanitariums, London’s Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam.
A young man of great promise, Dadd embarks on a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travel through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they find themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd’s fraught mind has been taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He becomes stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributes to sunstroke. But in Dadd’s imagination he has become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directs him to take a life, and Dadd is set on the road to Bedlam.