Thomas hennell biography

Thomas Hennell was born in Ridley, Kent. He studied at Regent Street Polytechnic, qualified as a teacher and taught for several years. Hennell spent some time researching his book Change in the Farm recording the changing scenes of rural life in Britain and Ireland in words and pictures. In the early 1930s he suffered a nervous breakdown and became an inmate at the Maudsley Hospital, After being discharged, at the urging of the artist Edward Bawden, he wrote The Wilderness, an account of his illness. At the outbreak of war in 1939 he wrote to the War Artists Advisory Committee offering his services as an artist. He travelled to Iceland, France and was finally sent to the Far East, where he died in mysterious circumstances in November 1945; the third war artist to die on active service. Hennell’s was a countryman’s vision of the landscape, focussing on the activities of the farm: hedging, threshing and baling, clearing orchards and the like.

Further reading:
Michael MacLeod, Thomas Hennell Countryman, artist and writer, Cambridge University Press, 1988

British artist

Thomas Hennell (16 April 1903 – 1945) was a British artist and writer who specialised in illustrations and essays on the subject of the British countryside. He was an official war artist during the Second World War and was killed while serving in Indonesia in November 1945.

Early life

Hennell was born in Ridley, Kent in 1903, the second son of the Rev. Harold Barclay Hennell and Ethel Mary Hennell.^[2] He attended primary school in Broadstairs and then secondary school at Bradfield College, Berkshire before studying art at Regent Street Polytechnic.^[3] Hennell qualified as a teacher in 1928 and taught for some years at the Kingswood School, Bath and at the King's School, Bruton in Somerset. Whilst at college Hennell had begun travelling around the British countryside to work on essays and illustrations of rural landscapes.^[2] He had a nervous breakdown from 1932–35 and was detained first at the Maudsley Hospital.^[3] When he recovered he returned to the work of recording scenes of ru

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