Ghosts in a landscape: farming life through the eyes of Thomas Hennell

Thomas Hennell is one of that generation of painters born in 1903 whose collective achievements are such an adornment of modern British art. Among his contemporaries are Edward Bawden, Richard Eurich, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Graham Sutherland. Some of these have been over-praised (Sutherland’s reputation was unhelpfully inflated for many years, then suffered a crash), others underrated, such as Eurich. In the current mood of reassessment, careers and deeds are being looked at again, and Hennell has benefited accordingly. Jessica Kilburn’s hefty book is very tangible evidence of this.

The English countryside was Hennell’s first love, and he came to prominence as an illustrator — and, indeed, writer — of books about how the land and the way it was cultivated was changing. His extensive knowledge was based on experience acquired during his travels by bicycle around the counties, and learnt through the activity of drawing. He drew the farm implements that were being superseded by mechanisation, the countrymen who used them and the landscape they inhabited.

His own very visual writing is quoted extensively and effectively in this new biography. He wrote poetry, a brave book about the mental breakdown which kept him hospitalised from 1932 to 1935 with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and a survey of traditional English husbandry, entitled Change in the Farm. He was a prolific letter writer, and thus supplies much material for this well-written, intricately researched and hugely detailed account of his life and work. Generously illustrated, with informative picture captions, the book has a relaxed breadth which in some ways suits the subject, though a shorter text might have had more chance of winning converts to Hennell’s cause.

Thomas Barclay Hennell was brought up in Kent, the second of four children of the Reverend Harold.