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

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.