Artist of the week
Official War Artist Thomas Hennell, who struggled with schizophrenia throughout his short life, should be better appreciated for both his shocking portrayals of conflict and his fine watercolours of pastoral life, says Peyton Skipwith
IN 1984, Sir John Rothenstein, former director of Tate Gallery, when revising his trilogy Modern English Painters, subtitled volume three ‘Hennell to Hockney’. Although, nearly four decades later, David Hockney’s star continues to rise, Thomas Hennell remains little known, despite various exhibitions and the publication, in 1988, of Michael Macleod’s excellent biography. Who was Hennell and why do we not know more about him? This year, a new book—entitled Thomas Hennell: The land and the mind—and an exhibition set out to answer this question.
Thomas Barclay Hennell—known as Tom —was an artist, author, poet and countryman. The son of a country parson in Kent, he was educated at Bradfield College in Berkshire and the Regent Street Polytechnic. However, he suffered from schizophrenia and spent the years 1933–35 in various mental asylums, an experience he recorded in a remarkable book, The Witnesses. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he worked for the Pilgrim Trust on the Recording Britain project and, in 1943, was commissioned as an Official War Artist. He served in northern Europe and Iceland before being assigned to the Far East, where he was killed in Surabaya, in 1945, by Javanese terrorists.
This crude summary masks a life of dedication and dogged persistence; partly idyllic, partly horrific. Hennell was one of those hyper-sensitive souls destined by nature to embellish the world of Arts—painting and poetry particularly. He strikes me as a figure born out of time, whose talent (genius, even) passes largely unsung until, down the line, some chance strikes a chord, stimulating a surge of interest in their work. His story reminds us of those of William Blake, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd, John Clare and Richard Jefferies, among others. Uniquely talented individuals, intuitively in touch with Nature, but living apart from the preoccupations of their fellow men.
Hennell was one such. His father was the rector of Ridley in Kent, one of the smallest parishes in England—comprising three houses, 13 cottages and the parish church— a few miles from Palmer’s beloved Shoreham. He grew up loving the land and those whose
A fellow student described him as “centrally sane; but as mad as a hatter”
livelihoods depended on it, but had no desire to share in their activities. Instead, Hennell developed the skills to record them, together with the country crafts that were fast disappearing in an increasingly mechanised world.
He was a man who inspired affection and I have had the good fortune to have known a number of his friends, most particularly Vincent Lines, Olive Cook and Edward Bawden, who remained devoted to his memory. Bawden’s description of him, quoted by Kilburn, captures his essence: ‘Tom was a very intense, solitary man, profoundly serious. I don’t believe he possessed natural facility, either as a draughtsman or as
a painter. He acquired skill painfully, by infinite persistence, but he was determined and dedicated.’
This is borne out by the fact that, at the polytechnic, he started at the bottom of the class, yet, in his final year, won the gold medal for the best achievement. A fellow student, Delmar Banner, described him as ‘centrally sane; but as mad as a hatter’. In later life, Hennell would cycle up to the Lake District to visit Banner and his wife, sleeping in barns or staying with a friendly farmer en route. Time and distance were of little concern to him.
Calling on the skills of a tinsmith and blacksmith respectively, his large old bicycle had been fitted with a long case to hold his paper and an ‘outsize’ carrier for his equipment. Cycling, always at a ‘steady five knots’, as one friend recalled, he was able to survey the countryside. Lines described one trip when ‘with his swiftly glancing vision, [Tom] espied a nest of dormice half-hidden in the upper branches of the hedgerow. He was off his bicycle in an instant and soon had the timorous little brown creatures in his hands for inspection and admiration’. It was when cycling round Essex and East Anglia in 1932, researching his book Change in the Farm, that he first met Bawden and Eric Ravilious. After Ravilious’s death, Hennell replaced him in recording the tasks undertaken by servicemen in Iceland—many regard these watercolours as his finest work. For me, however, he will always remain the last of those painters whose records of the minutiae of English country life are the very stuff of history. It was no coincidence that that fine writer H. J. Massingham sought him out to illustrate A Countryman’s Journal, Country Relics and others of his books. Nobody has ever recorded more lovingly the festive decoration of a corn rick or the differences between the way harvesters in Dorset and the Romney Marshes tied their sheaf-knots.
‘Thomas Hennell: The Land and the Mind’, by Jessica Kilburn, is published by The Pimpernel Press (£60). An exhibition of the same title, curated by Colin Gale and Dr Andrew Sim, will open at the Museum of the Mind, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Beckenham, Kent, when restrictions permit and run into June (www.museumofthemind.org.uk)
He acquired skill painfully, by infinite persistence, but he was determined and dedicated