The land is yours

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

- 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.