Matthew Barwick. Drawing by T. Hennell, ca. 1935.

[1935?]

1 drawing : pencil and india ink ; sheet 28.5 x 25.2 cm

Matthew Barwick

On verso: pencil drawing with blue crayon, of a man sitting cross-legged in an easy chair, presumably a staff member or fellow patient at Claybury

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). He died in 1945, apparently lynched by Indonesian nationalists while employed as a war artist

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

Wellcome Collection 729115i