The Rabbit Hutch is an unsentimental recollection of Richard Dadd’s childhood in Chatham. The characters are likely to be himself and his boyhood companions. Dadd here paints recollections of his own past with total veracity but without any sense of nostalgia, vividly recapturing the spirit which belongs uniquely to the preoccupations of childhood. The changed perception of childhood which comes with the increasing distance from it was to some extent made impossible for Dadd by his isolation in a place where he could never see children. Recently discovered in a private collection, The Rabbit Hutch is not recorded in the literature on Dadd to date. The first recorded owner of this watercolour, Dr Thomas Aitken was a physician and superintendent at the District Lunatic Asylum in Inverness, who had graduated, in 1858, from the University of Edinburgh. It is not known how or when he came into contact with Dadd but the existence of the manuscript letter that has always accompanied the watercolour suggests a possible connection with Sir Alexander Morison (1779-1866), who was one of the two visiting physicians to Bethlem between 1835 and 1853. Morison came from Newhaven near Edinburgh and retired there; two good reasons for these colleagues to be well acquainted. In the 1830s, Morison employed a number of artists to make portraits of patients in the Bethlem and Surrey Asylums to illustrate his book The Pysiognomy of Mental Diseases, 1838. The original watercolours are in an album in the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and are probably those referred to in the letter cited below. It is also thought that the dining-room hung with watercolours (mentioned in the letter) must have been at Morison’s house. He was very interested in Richard Dadd, and certainly had a number of his works in his collection. The letter reads: I had not much conversation with him. We dined at 1.30 & between that & tea which was at 4.30! a good part of the time was occupied in looking over a portfolio full of portraits which I am sure would have interested you, likenesses done by good artist, of an number of his patients, some represented in different stages of madness & then when well, they were mostly from the Surrey Asylum where he used to attend, the rest from Bethlehem. What I thought a more interesting and pleasing study was of a number of watercoloured paintings with which the dining room is hung round as close as they will go by a criminal lunatic in Bethlehem Dadd an artist who when doing a cartoon of St George & the Dragon for the House of Parliament took his poor father for the dragon & killed him. The subjects of the sketches are various sacred, historical, mytholo…..
Dr Thomas Aitken, MD, and thence by descent to: Gladys Aitken, by whom given to: Elizabeth Dunlop, by whom given to: Charles Croggan and by descent