More than 20 paintings by the artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl—the late mother of the former UK prime minister Boris Johnson—are due to go on show later this year at Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, UK (11 December-29 March 2025).
The exhibition What It Felt Like: the Maudsley Hospital paintings of Charlotte Johnson Wahl will feature works made during her nine-month stay at London’s Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell in 1974. The artists made dozens of works depicting scenes of hospital life throughout her time at the psychiatric facility.
Colin Gale, the director of Bethlem Museum of the Mind, says that the paintings, many of which have not been seen in public, have been drawn from different private collections. “At once confrontational in their subject matter and gentle, even humorous, in their rendering, they are testament to the artist's observational skills and emotional range. They lift the lid on mental distress and daily life in a psychiatric hospital, subjects rarely spoken about openly a generation ago,” he adds.
In 2015 The Mall Galleries in London held a retrospective of Johnson Wahl’s work. Writing in The Evening Standard, her granddaughter Lara Johnson-Wheeler said: “Grandma had a mental breakdown in 1974, her terrible and overwhelming OCD getting the better of her. She was away from the children, suffering and worrying, and the paintings depict this all too relatable and painfully human state of mind.
“So she was admitted to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital and over the nine months she was there, she completed around 80 canvases, documenting her time and her unique perspective of psychiatric care.” When she was discharged, Johnson Wahl took over the hospital’s boardroom for a selling exhibition.
Johnson Wahl told Medium journal in 2017 how and why she painted the works during her hospital stay. “It was awful. I was trying to get rid of my rituals, obsessions, fear of dirt, and dislike of food. I thought they could help me get rid of those obsessions but they couldn’t. They gave me canvases and paints, which was just wonderful. I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said.
The paintings reflect her state of mind at the time, depicting her torso covered in insects, confrontations with nurses and periods spent sitting in the hospital day room. “Her work reflects the emerging visual style of the 1970s, blending a minimalist, pop-art influenced, aesthetic with a palette of fashionably muted colours,” says a museum statement.
Johnson Wahl died aged 79 in 2021; she read English at Oxford University but interrupted her course to travel to the US with Stanley Johnson whom she married in 1963 (she later completed her degree, becoming the first married female undergraduate at her college, Lady Margaret Hall). She had four children, Boris, Rachel, Jo and Leo; the marriage ended in divorce in 1979 and she went on to marry the US historian Nicholas Wahl in 1988. Johnson Wahl established herself as a professional portrait painter, depicting sitters such as the actress Joanna Lumley and the author Jilly Cooper.
- What It Felt Like: the Maudsley Hospital paintings of Charlotte Johnson Wahl, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, London, 11 December-29 March 2025