Exploring mental health through art: A fresh look at Charlotte Johnson Wahl’s 1974 hospital paintings

Marking 50 years since an exhibition of her work was shown at the Maudsley Hospital, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind is offering a fresh look at Charlotte Johnson Wahl’s paintings of life in a psychiatric hospital.

Charlotte Johnson Wahl was a professional portrait painter who was for a while married to Stanley Johnson and is the mother of the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

She later started developing mental health difficulties and was treated in psychiatric hospitals, and while some patients turned to painting to cope with mental distress, for her, it was simply a continuation of her life’s work to paint what she saw.

The overwhelming imagery in the exhibition, while of people, is of their faces and hands, distorted and oversized. They reflect the body parts that often expand in our minds when we’re troubled. Much as people might hold hands up in front of a horror movie and peek through the gaps, she shows the same behaviour with the nurses and doctors who tried to penetrate the fog that had enveloped her life.

The paintings are also very immediate in the sense of their proximity, very few long views of the rooms and all up close perspectives of what she was seeing around her.

It’s a troubling visiage at times of people staring down at you, maybe judging you, telling you how to behave, what to do, when to do it. Anyone who has been in hospital for any reason will see themselves in these portraits of the strange disconcerting world that exists around the patient laying often prone and helpless.

The family that she loved and missed is present at times, but mostly, the exhibition is a patient’s perspective of life in the hospital.

The collection covers the eight months that she spent at the Maudsley Hospital in 1974. Shortly after she left, many of her paintings were exhibited there. A book about that exhibition from 50 years ago is also in a side room next to this retrospective.

One of her last paintings from her hospital stay shows people eating a bunch of Brussels sprouts. She had developed an aversion to painting food, and this was a sign of recovery. Although at the moment, just after Christmas, maybe Brussels sprouts aren’t quite the flavour people would have chosen.

The exhibition, What It Felt Like is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind until 29th March 2025.

Entry is free

The museum is about a 15-minute walk from Eden Park railway station, or you can catch the Route 356 bus between the two. The SL5 superloop also stops outside the museum.