Until the 1950s, art done in psychiatric hospitals tended to be used as a diagnostic tool. We talked about the images, and the different uses to which they have been put. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these were copies of the originals, which are held in the Wellcome Library archives at Euston). This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. When I returned to London I looked up Edward Adamson, and the collection of artworks he built during his 35 years at Netherne. I wondered what kind of matches would give you enough charcoal to make a small drawing, and how Beegan got hold of them. I wondered what it had been like behind the locked doors. The shiny, dun-coloured institutional paint the double fire doors with plastic portholes the windows that were a bit too high to see out of – at least for me. I remembered those corridors well, and I remembered how much I disliked them. It was strange, being able to imagine the rooms in which Beegan had lived – or, more accurately, since I never went into a locked ward when I was a child, the corridors he walked to get from the ward to the art studio and back. This is a slight exaggeration: Netherne was where my mother worked, and my grandparents worked before that, and where I spent a great deal of time when I was young. I was struck by the naive pictures, but more so by the fact that Beegan had been a patient at Netherne Hospital in Coulsdon, where, in effect, I grew up. He did many similar drawings, covered with esoteric writing which obviously had a private meaning for him.’ Beegan took to filling the paper with drawings of men and animals, and writing out abstruse, disconnected thoughts, or maybe messages. He drew vigorously on the only paper he could find.’ Adamson, who was tasked with introducing art therapy to the hospital, brought Beegan to his studio and gave him an easel, large sheets of paper and materials to work with. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. ‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Another drawing was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. These images were of curious creatures with human-like mouths, and of human figures with faces in profile. Most of the drawings were done painstakingly with rudimentary materials: the char from burned matches on Izal medicated toilet paper – the hard, shiny paper that was common in British institutions throughout the 20th century.
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