The pictures he made projected his mental state on to the landscapes he knew well and for this reason, are being showcased in Shipley Art Gallery’s exhibition.
Among other paintings on show, for instance by Blake and Hogarth, Goya and Dura, his work stands its ground.
Co-curator of the Shipley exhibition, Dr Leigh Wetherall-Dickson says of Clennell that while his work was overshadowed by mental illness, “he does have an extraordinary gift for conveying a melancholic atmosphere, particularly in his rendering of well-known landmarks of the North East…It is for all these aspects and not just the breakdown of his mental health that Clennell deserves to be remembered.”
While Clennell can be admired and explored as one artist with well-documented mental illness, this exhibition is part of an inter-disciplinary research project, Before Depression, which is considering a wider question. How did society and people respond to different mental states before these 'conditions' were given the names and modern diagnoses with which we are familiar?
With a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, researchers from the Universities of Northumbria and Sunderland have explored and drawn out new interpretations of how depression was represented and how it influenced art and literature between 1660 and the early years of the 19th century.
