Claybury Mental Hospital: mentally ill men walking in the grounds. Drawing by T. Hennell, ca. 1935.

[1935?]

1 drawing : pencil and india ink ; sheet 25.1 x 35.3 cm

In pencil on the verso: "Confer with H. Dunkarton's drawings in B.M." (meaning unknown)

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 in-patient 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 Mental Hospital, 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 a small number that survive from his time in the asylum: other drawings of his illness, described by him as "scribbled horrors", were destroyed by his mother after his early death (he was apparently lynched by Indonesian nationalists in 1945 while employed as a war artist)

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

Wellcome Collection 2897554i