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.
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Denne historien er fra March 03, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
