From Inside to Outside: Victorian England’s Relationship with Outsider Art Through Richard Dadd

This thesis focuses on Richard Dadd, a Victorian-era artist best known for painting his masterworks while institutionalized in a mental hospital. It also explores Outsider art, which is defined as artwork made by people who are disconnected from the conventional art world by circumstance. Dadd lived as an artist at a time when mental illness was considered taboo and the mentally ill were not treated as functioning members of the community, but Outsider art was a point of interest. We see this contradiction in society’s perception of Dadd during and after his lifetime, where his art is successful but he himself does not receive recognition. The thesis explores this juxtaposition and Dadd’s relationship to it by examining the arts culture of Victorian England along with the conditions of nineteenth-century mental hospitals through the lens of Dadd’s life