The tragic story of the artist Richard Dadd lies behind this striking and unusual portrait. As a young man, Dadd was regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation. After training at the Royal Academy schools, he had begun to attract attention for his imaginative pictures of historical and literary subjects, rendered in a meticulous and luminous style. But on an extended trip across Europe and the Middle East in 1842–3 he began to exhibit signs of insanity and delusional behaviour. Back in England, he murdered his father in a planned and vicious assault. He was declared insane and committed to mental institutions for the rest of his life. During almost forty-two years of confinement, Dadd continued to create art, producing a remarkable body of work which includes landscapes, shipping scenes and the fairy paintings for which he is now best known; his masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855–64, now hangs in Tate Britain.

Alexander Morison was one of the consultants who treated Dadd at the Bethlem Hospital in Southwark. Born in Edinburgh, Morison was a doctor who drifted into psychiatry more by chance than by design; in 1809, through the intervention of some powerful friends in London, he was appointed visiting physician to the private lunatic asylums in Surrey. Inspired by the great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (whom he visited on several occasions), Morison became a pioneer in the treatment of mental illness. From 1823 he began a series of lectures on mental diseases, initially in Edinburgh, then in London, which were among the first to be held in Britain.

Morison was a visiting consultant at the Bethlem Hospital from 1835 to 1852.He encouraged Dadd to continue his work as an artist and appears to have collected some of his paintings and drawings. Although there are few surviving records of their professional contact, we do know that Morison described Dadd as ‘an extraordinary Artist’. This portrait, painted in the year that Morison left his post at Bethlem, was probably a commission and may have been a parting gift marking the end of the relationship between the doctor and his patient. Morison is shown against the background of his estate at Newhaven near Edinburgh; he had married a wealthy cousin and was the proud owner of several properties in and around the Scottish capital. According to Dadd’s own inscription on the back of the canvas, the background details were taken from a sketch provided by Morison’s daughter Ann. The two Newhaven fishwives in the background were perhaps based on calotypes by Hill and Adamson. Morison holds his hat and his handkerchief as if in a gesture of farewell but the stiff frontal pose, the staring eyes and sharp detailing lend an awkward quality to the work. Perhaps our knowledge of the circumstances behind its production also adds an eerie and uncomfortable edge to this haunting picture.