This landscape on Rhodes would have been visited by Dadd when on a sightseeing and sketching trip with his patron, Sir Thomas Philips. Shortly afterwards, the two travelled to Egypt, where Dadd is said to have contracted the severe sunstroke which precipitated his rapid fall into insanity. During his later years in the criminal lunatic asylum, he honed to an extreme degree the technique of painting seen here, where minute dabs of paint are hatched or stippled to describe gradiated colour and tone. Such an approach here captures this landscape as through a haze of intensified perception, generating a sense of vivid light and almost uncomfortable exposure.