Flight Out of Egypt

1849–59

All Dadd had been able to think of since they had brought him to Bedlam was flight.

At first it was simply the flight of escape; he had hardly recognized that he was truly imprisoned—the time lost shape, compressed or elongated into dreams—and he had entertained a notion that to change his landscape would be as easy as putting a brush to paper.

But he no longer thought that way.

Five years had passed in the cages, as if he were a species of carnivore at the Zoological Gardens. Sometimes Mr. Munro came, the physician in charge of his case. Munro had told him that he was not only the son of a doctor and a grandson of a doctor, but that all three—son, father, grandfather—had been the physicians to Bedlam, the monstrosity of an asylum in St. George’s Fields. He had told Dadd one day, trying to elicit a response from the silence, that he had been brought up in a house where Turner and Hunt and Cotman were frequent visitors.

At the name Turner, Dadd had looked up at him.

“I am not indifferent to art,” Mr. Munro had said.

And they had brought Dadd oils and a canvas.

At first he painted what he remembered of his trips to Syria and Egypt, before the time that Osiris had captured him and shown him the point in the throat above the ridge of collarbone, the place where life is breathed into the body by God himself and the place where the blade must be put to release life. When Adam was filled with breath, God had put his mouth to this very spot above the clavicle. Osiris showed him the place, in Egypt, in 1842, under a full moon, while the crew of the boat chanted in a circle on the sands.

When Dadd had seen his father standing before him in Cobham Park that fateful evening, he had known what it was that he had been sent to do. The voices urged it; it was his divine instruction. It was not to end life, but to free it. Not to defy God, but to confirm him and his creation. Only the few were brought this way. Only the few were shown the edge of life where creation and destruction trembled together and fought for dominance. Osiris had put the knife in his hand, the forearm on his father’s shoulder, the blade against his father’s throat.

Come Unto These Yellow Sands, he had called a painting that same year. His siren call. A journey back to the sand-filled Nile, the silt making whorls in the water, his hand scoured by sand if he dipped it into the current.

On the canvas, half-naked and naked figures streamed through a rocky arch at the edge of the sea, threading like music realized in flesh through the sky, clefts and chords uncurling into bodies.

Inside the bellowing cages, the ranting galleries of corridors and cells, in the half-light afforded by tiny windows high in the walls, Dadd had painted Syria and Luxor and Damascus. He had filled notebooks with them all. He tried to bring back the aching sunlight he had known; the heat, the intoxication of the senses.

My mind is full of wild vagaries, he had told himself.

Outside in the greater world, men moved across the globe. Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert and reached Lake Ngami; the English colonized India; Paganini was approaching the last virtuoso ascension of his life; revolutions crossed Europe; Chopin struggled in the long closing journey of consumption; the speed of light in air and water was first measured by Foucault and Fizeau. And when Munro allowed the easel to be put before Dadd, he painted flight and deserts of his own.

And so he came, in the fifth year, to this great living image. The canvas was forty inches by fifty, a blaze of red, gold, white, and green. The water carriers, the women, and the men seated on camels and horseback, and the blades: spears and curved scimitars; swords and daggers at the waist. The broadness about faces and foreheads was back, the emptiness of some eyes, the unfocused insignificance. Hands reached from the bottom left-hand side of the picture, devilish claws below the seemingly innocent image of a shawled girl bringing jars to the side of the stream. In the center a warrior stood drinking, a leopardskin around his shoulders. To the right, a boy whispered in an old man’s ear. There were dancing girls and merchants and soldiers, and in the corner, at the foot of this bedlam, was the Christ child at his mother’s knee.

Dadd went over the painting again and again. He couldn’t make the spear points go away, or the reflections of metal from the armor. Light picked up the spouts of drinking vessels and coated them in silver. Anywhere the mouth touched. Anywhere God had put his mouth to man, breathing life through the color on the brush. They were created and ignited, all of them, all the girls, every child, all the women’s faces, all the knowing broadness of the men, the strange ridged veins on the forearms, through the bleeding tip of the brush.

It exhausted him.

He had flown; he had disappeared for a while. He had vanished into a painted crowd.