Your Paintings 2

Now that the oil paintings held by the Archives & Museum (representing about 10% of our art collection as a whole) are available to view on the BBC’s ‘Your Paintings’ website, we have taken up the same hobby as Tim Knox of Sir John Soane’s Museum (but shortly moving to the Fitzwilliam Museum), i.e. running online searches to see what can be found in public art collections in the UK. We know our own collection fairly well – and thumbnails of all our works have been browsable on our website for some time – but what is new is the unexpected juxtapositions thrown up by searching across collections of works in oil.

We have always known, for example, that a search on the term ‘aspiration’ would return the work of art of that title by Charles Sims, RA (1873-1928) in our collection. We didn’t know, however, of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s work of the same title by G.F. Watts, nor of Audrey Knight’s Aspirations at Worcester or of Timothy Jarvis’ Age of Aspirations in Leicestershire.

Similarly, a search on ‘indecision’ throws up the work we know about by Bryan Charnley, but also one we had never heard of in Plymouth by Andrea Landini; and a search on ‘depression’ brings up not only Marion Patrick’s Depression I and Depression II, but also a work by Jock McFadyen, located in Glasgow, simply titled Depression.

The fact that a search on ‘depression’ also brings up an artwork on the subject of the Great Depression serves as a reminder that search results need to be treated with discrimination. To take another example, searching on ‘anger’ returns five pages’ worth of paintings with that word in their titles, including Elise Pacquette (née Warriner)’s The Anger Within from the Archives & Museum’s collection and a few other relevant results, among them Roy Billingham’s Chaos, Anger, Frustration, Carel Weight’s The Seven Deadly Sins – Anger and Dez Quarréll’s Into the Anger Chamber. It also returns a page of paintings which have been subject-tagged with this term by visitors to the site. However, these pages of results are mostly filled with paintings with titles including words such as ‘danger’, ‘stranger’, ‘Granger’, ‘Angers’ (the French city), ‘hanger’, ‘doppelganger’, ‘tangerine’ and so on.

It would be difficult to interrogate the Your Paintings database in such a way as to ensure that all irrelevant results are filtered out. Yet this very fact opens up possibilities for serendipitous discovery. Our search on ‘anger’ is a good case in point, yielding – quite by accident – paintings on the subject of Christ driving the money-changers from the Temple by Il Garofalo, the school of Jacopo Bassano, Salvator Rosa, Stanley Spencer and William Roberts.

In any event, we here at the Archives & Museum are delighted by the enhanced public visibility of works in our collection by the likes of Sims, Charnley, Patrick and Warriner which results from their inclusion in the BBC’s Your Paintings website.

Charles Sims – Aspiration

Your Paintings: Nearly One Hundred Artworks from the Bethlem Collection Online

Today the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC completed their hugely ambitious project to put online the United Kingdom’s entire collection of oil paintings in public ownership. 3,217 venues across the UK have participated in the project and 211,861 paintings are now on the Your Paintings website. Among these are nearly 100 artworks from the Bethlem Collection, which have been newly professionally photographed and made available alongside the details of each work. Although this is just a tenth of our collection, it includes every work we own in oil, acrylic or tempura, and can be explored through the Your Paintings site here.

While some of these works can be seen by visitors to the Museum, others are in store, and the Your Paintings site will make our collection visible to a much wider audience. Paintings include the bright canvases of Elise J. M. Pacquette (née Warriner), which featured in the artist’s degree show, focusing on anorexia nervosa: the size of these striking paintings means that only one is generally on display. Other artist collections include the work of Marion Patrick (whose paintings of isolated children have previously featured in In the Frame), Bryan Charnley and Stanley Lench – subject of a recent exhibition, but not on permanent display.

In February 2013, the BBC plan to lead a nationwide celebration of Your Paintings with many opportunities for the public to discover paintings that have rarely been on view – perhaps also those collections, like our own, that are little known beyond Bethlem. The public is also being invited to ‘tag’ the nation’s paintings. The results will allow future users of the Your Paintings website to find paintings of subjects that interest them, such as mental health.

Bryan Charnley – Broach Schizophrene (1987)

Collections on Tour

In the small space of the present Bethlem Museum, we can only display around five per cent of our nearly 1,000 artworks at any one time. Luckily, art from the Bethlem Collection is often requested by exhibitions elsewhere. The Richard Dadd and Louis Wain collections make frequent journeys en masse: this summer, our collection of Wain cats will be travelling to the Nicholson Museum and Gallery in Leek, Staffordshire. The exhibition runs from 26 June until 8 October 2012.

Meanwhile, Elise Warriner’s The Anger Within has travelled back across the Channel, this year to be displayed at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden (Netherlands), in an exhibition opening next week (Friday 13 April) and running until September 9th. The striking image was painted as part of Elise’s degree show, “Welcome to my World”, which focused on her struggles with anorexia nervosa, an illness from which she later recovered. The painting forms part of the exhibition The Weighty Body, shown last year at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent. Themed around the history of fasting, the exhibition explores the multiple religious, medical, aesthetic and political meanings of the refusal of food throughout the centuries. The exhibition catalogue is written in Dutch, French and English and explores a variety of artworks and images relating to body size. Many of these can be found on the Museum Boerhaave website.

Finally, one of our paintings appears in central London, in the Wellcome Collection‘s new exhibition, Brains: The Mind as Matter (29 March – 17 June). Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see Allan Beveridge’s Me, Myself, I. The exhibition ”follows the long quest to manipulate and decipher the most unique and mysterious of human organs, whose secrets continue to confound and inspire”, asking us “not what brains do to us, but what we have done to brains.” It will explore ways in which we have measured and classified, mapped and modeled, treated and displayed this complex organ within anatomy, science and art. On Saturday April 14, visitors can come to our Richard Dadd exhibition at the Archives and Museum from 11am, before heading over to the Brain Jar special event at Wellcome from 2 – 6pm. This afternoon of events for adults includes a chance to practise brain surgery skills, witness trepanning and graduate from the school of phrenology!

Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective

Staff from the Archives and Museum recently attended the 3^rd International Conference on the History and Heritage of Psychiatry, which was held at the Museum Dr Guislain in Ghent on the 28^th and 29^th April.

The theme of the conference was Dangerously Young: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry from a Historical Perspective. Bethlem’s archives were featured in two papers: Colin Gale and Caroline Smith examined the cases of several child and adolescent patients treated at Bethlem in the nineteenth century and Zbigniew Kotowicz of the University of Lisbon drew upon his extensive research in the Bethlem archives to examine the development of child psychiatry. Surprisingly few children were treated at Bethlem; of the 1069 patients under the age of 21 admitted between 1815 and 1899 only 58 were 15 or under.

The Belgian perspective was provided by a number of high-profile speakers, including the Flemish Commissioner for the Rights of Children. Belgium has relatively high levels of teen suicide, children in prison, child abuse and domestic violence (shockingly it is statistically more dangerous to be a Belgian woman than a Belgian soldier) and several papers explored the connection between child abuse and delinquency.

The role of DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in the ever-increasing number of mental disorders being diagnosed in children was a recurring theme, and Lisa Appignanesi (Chair of the Freud Museum) questioned how far an attempt is being made to medicalise ordinary emotions such as sadness, shyness and anxiety in order to benefit the drug companies.

Overall this was a thought-provoking conference and an excellent opportunity to meet representatives from museums of psychiatry throughout Europe. There was also a chance to pay a visit to one of Bethlem’s paintings: The Anger Within by Elise Warriner, on loan to the Museum Dr Guislain as part of their exhibition The Weighty Body: Fat or Thin, Vanity or Insanity. The exhibition explores the history of fasting, including those who stopped eating for religious or political reasons, and includes several works on the theme of anorexia nervosa. The exhibition has now closed but is due to be reprised at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden in 2012.