Taking over the asylum: art made at Bedlam and beyond in pictures | Art and design

Posted by Jenniffer Sheldon on Friday, August 9, 2024

Taking over the asylum: art made at Bedlam and beyond – in pictures

A new exhibition collects together work made by inmates of mental hospitals – which is often startlingly detailed and fiercely lucid

Main image: Richard Dadd’s portrait of Bethlem governor Sir Alexander Morison, 1852. Photograph: Courtesy National Galleries Scotland

Mon 19 Sep 2016 02.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 19 Oct 2022 10.23 EDT

  • Epitaph, of My Poor Jack, Squirrel II, James Hadfield, 1834

    A new exhibition, Bedlam, collects together artwork made by patients in mental hospitals – either before they were committed or afterwards, either made as therapy or protest. • Bedlam is at London’s Wellcome Collection until 15 January

  • Untitled (Two fishes); Untitled (A donkey, a house, a tree etc.), JJ Beegan, 1946

    Some of the work on display is taken from the Adamson Collection, which compiles art created by patients of the Netherne hospital in Surrey. Little is known about JJ Beegan, who created artworks on toilet paper using charred matches

  • Unknown artist, Adamson Collection

    Adamson is known as the father of art therapy, and was the first artist to be employed by the NHS. Under his guidance, art made by patients was analysed for evidence of psychopathology

  • Unknown artist, Adamson Collection

    The Netherne artist studio was set up for for rigorous experiments, with matching easels and paper, and tests done where patients would paint first to Debussy, then Bach, or create art pre- and post-lobotomy. More than 20,000 artworks were produced by 700 people between 1946 and 1950

  • Unknown artist, Adamson Collection

    Another work from the Adamson Collection, as included in Abandoned Goods, a short film by Pia Borg and Edward Lawrenson about the collection

  • Irren=Anstalt Band=Hain (Mental Asylum Band-Copse), Adolf Wölfli, 1910

    Other work in the exhibition includes this by Adolf Wölfl. Physically and sexually abused as a child, a series of attempted child molestations saw him eventually confined for life in a Swiss asylum. He began created intensely detailed drawings, which also sometimes incorporated a kind of musical notation

  • Sir Alexander Morison, 1779–1866: Alienist,

    Richard Dadd, 1852Equally detailed were the works of Richard Dadd, a patient at Bethlem Hospital (AKA Bedlam) who was committed after killing his father, believing him to be the devil. The subject of this painting is Alexander Morison, who served as governor of Bethlem, and collected several of Dadd’s watercolours

  • Richard Dadd in Bethlem at work on his painting Contradiction, Henry Hering, 1857

    Dadd at work. He is best known for his work that depicts fairies and other fantastical creatures; his most famous painting is The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which has inspired the likes of Queen and Terry Pratchett

  • Scales, John Gilmour, 1910

    Amid a career as a businessman working with the Trinidadian sugar industry, John Gilmour spent time in Gartnavel asylum in Glasgow and Crichton asylum in Dumfries. He had paranoid delusions, believing he had given his wife and children syphilis and that those at the hospital were trying to harm him

  • The Confessional Press, John Gilmour, 1910

    Gilmour’s art vents against those who had him locked up, in highly satirical and allegorical drawings

  • Architectural Plans and Explanatory Notes, James Tilly Matthews, 1810-11

    In 1810, Bethlem launched a public competition to design a new hospital building, and James Tilly Matthews, confined there since 1797, offered up his own suggestions. In notes alongside his designs, he argues that inmates should be able to grow vegetables, look after the sick and help with chores

  • A Mask, Vaslav Nijinsky, 1919

    The great ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky was world famous during his tenure with the Ballets Russes, directed by Sergei Diaghilev. But his mental health declined, and he spent time in asylums, where he created drawings fixated on circular forms

  • L’Homme à la pipe, Vincent Van Gogh, 1890

    Vincent Van Gogh made this, his only etching, after he was released from the Saint-Paul asylum in Provence. It depicts his doctor Paul Ferdinand Gachet, described by Van Gogh as ‘a ready-made friend and something like a new brother … he’s very nervous and very bizarre himself’

  • A Day Room, David Beales, 2003, based on experiences from 1981

    Beales reflects on his time at Bedlam with this drawing, saying: ‘In the day room of an admission ward in an old psychiatric hospital, morning coffee was served from a jug on the counter by a member of the domestic staff. The patients who were not well enough for therapy sat in armchairs, talking or resting. Occasionally a patient too disturbed for therapy was brought to the day room to socialise. The nurse would be there to give out medication, help the patients fill out their weekly menu, and provide counselling’
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