The Development Of The Art Collection 1830-2007

You would expect a hospital 760 years old to have paintings of kings and queens, governors and benefactors. Indeed we do: our oldest is a portrait of King Henry VIII from the school of Holbein. But one hundred and fifty years ago we started to collect art by our patients. The core of the collection was started by two psychiatrists, Dr Eric Guttmann and Dr the Hon Walter Maclay who worked at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1930s. They were clearly influenced by the art of the insane. Guttmann was primarily interested in clinical research. Maclay, a wealthy man, collected for his private enjoyment, and his interest was an extension of his more general cultural pursuits. Also dating from this period are the pictures produced during experiments at the Maudsley Hospital with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, in which Guttmann was particularly involved. These experiments were based on the theory that drug-induced hallucinations would demonstrate the hallucinations experienced by patients during psychotic illnesses. After their deaths a Trust was set up and the curator, Dr D L Davies, continued to acquire paintings, notably those by Louis Wain (1860-1939). In 1967 a permanent archivist was appointed, Patricia Alderidge. She brought together the paintings from all over the joint hospitals and was instrumental in the acquisition of many further works of psychiatric art. In 1992 the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust was set up. Due largely to her work the Trust now has a notable art collection.

WHY WE COLLECT

We collect art by past and present users of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and its sister hospitals. We collect art with the specific purpose of exhibiting it. Our role is to drive forward the de-stigmatisation of mental illness. 

Our art falls generally into three categories:

• Artists who became mentally ill.
• Patients for whom art contributed to recovery from mental illness.
• Artists who communicate mental distress through their work.

Here is a small selection of three of each category.

ARTISTS WHO BECAME MENTALLY ILL

Richard Dadd (1817-1886)

Richard Dadd was born in 1817. He began drawing when he was about thirteen, and he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1837.  He began exhibiting his work in the same year, and soon began to make a reputation. He was considered to be one of the most promising young artists of his generation, and was also known for his gentleness and good nature.

At the age of twenty-five he was employed to travel with Sir Thomas Phillips through Europe and the Middle East, and make drawings of the places they visited. 

Towards the end of the ten-month journey he developed symptoms of severe mental disturbance. By the time he reached home he was suffering from paranoid delusions. On 28 August 1843 he stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Rochester in Kent, believing him to be the devil in disguise.

Dadd fled to France and was arrested after trying to cut the throat of a stranger in a coach.  He spent ten months in a French asylum before being brought back to England. In 1844 he was committed to the State Criminal Lunatic Asylum which was then attached to Bethlem Hospital.  For many years he was unpredictable and occasionally violent. He never completely lost his delusions.  In 1864 he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Asylum, which was built to replace the criminal wings at Bethlem.  He died there in 1886.

Dadd continued to paint throughout his forty-two years of confinement in Bethlem and Broadmoor. His most famous works are The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke (1855-64), on display at Tate Britain and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania (1854-58), in the Lloyd-Webber collection. Here you can see him at work at Bethlem:

Charles Sims (1873-1928)

Charles Sims’ reputation as a painter was established with his first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries in 1906. He became best known for lyrical open-air scenes.

In 1918 he was sent to France as an official artist. He became gradually more reserved and aloof, and appeared to be a very lonely and pathetic figure.  He was Keeper of the Academy Schools from 1920 to 1926, and earned much of his living by portrait painting during this period.

In the last two years of his life he worked on a series which he called ‘Spirituals’ or ‘Spiritual Ideas’. He killed himself shortly before six of these paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1928. During this last period he had been undergoing treatment by a ‘nerve specialist’. After his suicide it was rumoured that he had been insane. His painting was profoundly affected, both in style and content, by the mental turmoil which he was experiencing. 

William Kurelek 1927-1977

William Kurelek’s parents had emigrated from the Ukraine to Canada. He had a very unhappy childhood. He suffered increasing psychological problems. He came to England in 1952 and went straight to the Maudsley Hospital and asked to be admitted. He was a patient there for a few years, and subsequently an outpatient. Here is the best known painting he completed while with us. It is The Maze.

He recovered. Employed as a picture framer initially he then became a full-time artist. He returned to Canada in 1959 and his first one-man show was in 1960. He became an artist of national importance and his paintings are widely known today. He died in 1977.

Elise Anorexia is possibly the most hurtful of all mental conditions. More often than not found in teenage girls, they can be driven to the verge of self-destruction and their families can suffer from deep and lasting feelings of guilt and helplessness. Elise suffered from it for ten years, and was our patient in the Eating Disorders Unit Despite this she took an art degree and made anorexia the subject of her degree show, called “Welcome to my World” in 1993. It was to be another four years before she was finally cured. Here Elise she portrays how she felt: She recovered.

Sue

Sue had to retire as a corporate tax solicitor at the age of thirty-seven having been diagnosed as suffering from schizo-affective disorder. Her psychosis and depression led to many hospital admissions, during which she first began drawing and painting.

She specialises in these small detailed paintings. She wrote “It was during my time in hospital that I started working visually, trying to articulate something I could not express verbally. … I strongly believe that most people who suffer from mental illness benefit from using visual and creative means of expression.”

She went on to study printmaking and digital design and is now a full-time artist.

ARTISTS WHO COMMUNICATE MENTAL DISTRESS THROUGH THEIR WORK

Jonathan Martin (1782-1838)

Jonathan Martin is best known for his partially successful attempt to burn down York Minster in 1829. An outwardly calm gentleman, inside he was seething with contempt for the clergy and bishops of the Church of England. He escaped from a private madhouse. Deeply religious, he came to York to warn the clergy that if they did not reform their ways, retribution would follow.

After five days no one had taken any notice of him, so he set fire to the Minster and burned down the choir, and half of the roof collapsed. He was arrested and found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was consigned to Bethlem Royal Hospital as we were at that time also running the state criminal lunatic asylum on behalf of the Government. He drew throughout his time, vengeful, apocalyptic drawings, and here you can see his one of London’s overthrow.

This is art with a clear indication of the personality of the patient and showing a clear link with his actions. Jonathan Martin was not an artist by trade. His brother, John Martin was. This is an untrained artist consumed by his passion and putting it down in art.

Marion Patrick (1940-1993)   Marion Patrick suffered all her life from severe manic depressive illness. She was first admitted to hospital when she was fifteen. She studied for four years at a local school of art in Lancashire. She specialised from the outset in painting sad and isolated young children, sometimes singly, sometimes in small groups, but never appearing to communicate with each other. She wrote in 1964 “My work is an attempt to communicate beyond the isolation of an individual. My work is concerned with this inevitable isolation”. These pictures probably date from around the time of her one admission to the Maudsley Hospital, when she was experiencing episodes of depression almost every year. A key to understanding her is that she associated the onset of depression with her urge to paint.

Bryan Charnley (1949 –1991)

Brian Charnley was an enthusiastic painter, studied art at secondary school, and started to study at an art college. He started to suffer from schizophrenia at age 23 and was hospitalised two years later. He was put on drugs and electro-convulsive therapy. He wrote "On release I found myself in a fairly desperate state emotionally to which, eventually, I responded by taking up painting and soon went full-time. … I gradually began to work more from my imagination and address myself to an interior life.

We bought this painting from him when he was 39. That year he wrote “The present main body of work came about because I felt I needed to respond more directly in my work to those negative aspects of life which threatened to overwhelm me”

You can see further examples of the work of this talented artist at http://www.bryancharnley.info.

THE COLLECTION

Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust owns nearly a thousand artworks. To see the complete gallery, click here. We loan works from our collection. To see our loans policy, click here.