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.
この記事は Country Life UK の March 03, 2021 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は Country Life UK の March 03, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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