Sketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or Peevishness

Sketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or Peevishness

Richard Dadd

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Between 1853 and 1855 Dadd painted "Sketches to Illustrate the Passions," a series of about thirty watercolors. The earliest use characters from Shakespeare to portray strong emotions, such as Jealousy and Hatred, and these were followed by genre-like images such as "Senility and Peevishness." We are shown two workmen buying and eating pasties outside a tavern watched by a brazier-keeper and barman. The inscribed title specifies the subject, and lettered signs advertize a range of alcohol on offer, but how the imagery illustrates the named passions remains mysterious. After demonstrating early artistic promise, and travelling to Greece and the Near East as draftsman to Sir Thomas Phillips in 1842, Dadd succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia and murdered his father. Confined to psychiatric institutions from 1843, he continued painting and left a large oeuvre that escaped significant notice until the 1960s. Today Dadd is regarded as a Victorian master whose enforced withdrawal from society allowed him to refine a unique talent. "Sketches to Illustrate the Passions" belongs to a long tradition of imagery devoted to human folly, even as its unsettling details, and reliance on memory and imagination anticipate modern sensibilities.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or PeevishnessSketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or PeevishnessSketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or PeevishnessSketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or PeevishnessSketch to Illustrate the Passions—Senility or Peevishness

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.