A Wayside Inn was painted in Broadmoor Hospital, after Dadd had been in confinement for nearly thirty years. It is painted in the very fine stippling technique which he used for his most personal watercolours, haunting memories of scenes from which he had been cut off for most of a lifetime and would never see again These pictures, built up from microscopic specks of soft colour so insubstantial that they might have been painted on gauze, achieve an almost hallucinatory clarity and intensity of vision. The composition, with its appealing combination of English country pub on the left and fanciful Mediterranean landscape on the right, is held in perfect balance by the elegant horse which gazes out across the plain. The figures, both human and animal, are surprisingly naturalistic: the figures in Dadd’s later work often have an air of remoteness and unreality which is readily attributable to his own isolation from his subject matter. This picture was almost certainly framed in Broadmoor and possibly by Dadd himself. The frame may even pre-date the picture, which shows signs of having been painted specially to fit it. When found, it was still sealed with a contemporary newspaper pasted onto the back.
Acquired in 1992 with the assistance of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the National Art Collections Fund and the Pilgrim Trust.