In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd killed his father after developing symptoms of what would now be diagnosed as schizophrenia. He essentially vanished into the Victorian psychiatric system, where he remained until his death, in 1886. The paintings Dadd left are strange, ranging from literary and Biblical scenes to pure fantasy. In recent decades, however, Dadd has gone from a connoisseur’s curiosity to a consequential figure in Victorian art. The art historian Nicholas Tromans, who curated this exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, says the turning point came in 1963, when Dadd’s best-known painting—the extraordinary The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke—was donated to the Tate Gallery by the poet Siegfried Sassoon. It’s a bizarre hodgepodge of intensely imagined, precisely drawn figures. Caught up in his own world, Dadd may very well be one of the first moderns. —Andrew Pulver