A tempestuous sea with a man chasing a boat.

Previous title, replaced April 2024: Visions of a schizophrenic: right, a tempestuous sea, left a man chasing a boat. Watercolour by T. Hennell, ca. 1935.

[1935?]

1 painting : pencil and watercolour ; sheet 31 x 49 cm

"This was most likely painted soon after Hennell was discharged 'recovered' (on 31st October 1935) from Claybury psychiatric hospital, Essex" (label on verso of mount)

Thomas Hennell was a professional artist (illustrator, poet, chronicler of countryside ways) who underwent a prolonged schizophrenic episode from 1932 to 1935. He wrote an account of his illness, The witnesses (published in London in 1945 and reprinted in New York in 1967), in which he recounted how his hallucinations appeared to him at the time. He was detained as an inpatient first at St John's Hospital, Stone (the building had been Buckinghamshire County Pauper Lunatic Asylum), then at the Maudsley Hospital (at Denmark Hill SE5) and finally at Claybury, Essex: he disliked his treatment at the first two, and satirised the Maudsley psychiatrists in his book, but enjoyed the humane therapy at Claybury (though there is a signed drawing by him in the Tate of staff stealing from a patient in Claybury). Although he was a prolific artist, the present drawing is one of only two that survive illustrating his mental state: other drawings of his illness were destroyed by his mother after his early death (he was apparently lynched by Indonesian nationalists while employed as a war artist)

Michael MacLeod, Thomas Hennell, Cambridge 1988 (on the artist)

Wellcome Collection 663468i

This work is untitled: the title has been supplied by the cataloguer.