The Metropolitan Museum in New York has acquired the Richard Dadd watercolour that was re-discovered in a provincial auction by Sim Fine Art last year.

It will be the first work by the artist to have been acquired by the prestigious US museum described last month by Apollo magazine as 'surely the world's pre-eminent museum".

Known simply by an abbreviated title: ‘Sketch to Ilustrate the Passions: Senility & Peevishness’, the image had never been reproduced and was unknown, visually at least, in the literature. In Dadd’s catalogue raisonee, it is listed as ‘whereabouts unknown’.

Dadd, a Victorian artist noted for his depictions of fairies and other supernatural subjects, was incarcerated in the Bethlem Hospital in 1843, after killing his father. It was in ‘Bedlam’ where Dadd produced his most celebrated works, including the powerful and mysterious ‘Passions’ series of genre pictures, each image depicting a vice, virtue or human characteristic.