This watercolour, with its exquisitely fine brushwork, was painted soon after Dadd’s transfer to Broadmoor after twenty years in Bethlem. Though many of his watercolours are painted in wash, which he handled with great confidence, this is an example of his most personalised technique in which large areas are minutely stippled with the point of the brush. Over the years Dadd refined this method, based on the miniaturist’s use of stippling which he must have learnt early in life, to produce dreamlike scenes of such delicacy that they seem to have been lightly breathed onto the paper. The subject is drawn from memories of his Middle Eastern travels more than twenty years earlier, possibly aided by a sketchbook which he is known to have had with him in the hospitals. The foremost figure is clearly his travelling companion and patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The sharply observed Nile boats are a reminder of Dadd’s deep love of shipping subjects which he retained from his childhood beside the River Medway at Chatham. He continued to paint ships of all kinds throughout his confinement. Dadd used French in the titles of several pictures around this time and also, as here, for his own name (it is signed par Monsr. Rd. Dadd). Possibly the disturbance of moving to Broadmoor revived memories of the period he had spent in a French asylum after the murder. In his early days in Bethlem he seems occasionally to have passed himself off as a Frenchman.
Acquired in 1996 with the assistance of the MGC/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the National Art Collections Fund.