Grace Winifred Pailthorpe (29 July 1883 – 19 July 1971) was a British surrealist painter, surgeon, and psychology researcher.
Early life and World War I
Pailthorpe was born in
St Leonards-on-Sea
St Leonards-on-Sea (commonly known as St Leonards) is a town and seaside resort in the Borough of Hastings in East Sussex, England. It has been part of the borough since the late 19th century and lies to the west of central Hastings. The origina ...
in
Sussex
Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the English ...
in 1883. She was the third child and the only daughter among the ten children born to Edward Wright Pailthorpe, a stockbroker, and Anne Lavinia Pailthorpe née Green, a seamstress, who were both members of the
Plymouth Brethren
The Plymouth Brethren or Assemblies of Brethren are a low church and non-conformist Christian movement whose history can be traced back to Dublin, Ireland, in the mid to late 1820s, where they originated from Anglicanism. The group emphasizes ...
, a strict and puritanical religious sect. The Plymouth Brethren were a separatist sect and the children were all home-schooled to limit their exposure to wider society. After Edward Pailthorpe died in 1904 the family moved to Southport in Lancashire.
Pailthorpe enrolled at the Royal College of Music in 1908 but soon decided to study medicine and by 1914 had qualified as a doctor at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne with a degree awarded by
Durham University
, mottoeng = Her foundations are upon the holy hills (Psalm 87:1)
, established = (university status)
, type = Public
, academic_staff = 1,830 (2020)
, administrative_staff = 2,640 (2018/19)
, chancellor = Sir Thomas Allen
, vice_chan ...
Haute Marne
Haute-Marne (; English: Upper Marne) is a department in the Grand Est region of Northeastern France. Named after the river Marne, its prefecture is Chaumont. In 2019, it had a population of 172,512.Scottish Women's Hospital in Salonika.
Career
After the war, Pailthorpe travelled extensively across the world, including four years spent working as a district medical officer at Youanmi in Western Australia between 1918 and 1922. She also worked as a medical officer for a gold mining company in Australia. When she returned to England in 1922, Pailthorpe began studying psychological medicine and Freudian analysis. She started research into criminal psychology at Birmingham Prison and, in 1923, with a grant from the Medical Research Council began research at Holloway Women's Prison. The same year she had a paper on delinquent behavior published in '' The Lancet'' and became an associate member of the
British Psychoanalytic Society
The British Psychoanalytical Society was founded by the British neurologist Ernest Jones as the London Psychoanalytical Society on 30 October 1913. It is one of two organizations in Britain training psychoanalysts, the other being the British P ...
. She proceeded to publish books and papers on the psychology of delinquency and, in 1931, established the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals, which eventually became the modern day Portman Clinic, now based within the National Health Service, and the
Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) is a charity based in the United Kingdom focusing on crime and the criminal justice system.Gibson, Bryan (2009)''The Pocket A-Z of Criminal Justice'' Waterside Press. p. 198. It seeks to brin ...
. The Association was the first in the world for the scientific treatment of delinquency and counted among its Vice Presidents Carl Jung, H. G. Wells and Sigmund Freud. In 1932 she published two papers on her Holloway Prison research and in 1934 resumed taking private patients for psychoanalysis.
In 1935 Pailthorpe met
Reuben Mednikoff Reuben Mednikoff (1906–1972), was a British surrealist artist.
Mednikoff was born in London in 1906 into a Jewish family of Russian ancestry. He trained at Saint Martin's School of Art.
He was married to Grace Pailthorpe
Grace Winifred Pailth ...
and together they began research into the psychology of art. Married and living in Port Isaac in Cornwall the couple undertook experiments in psychoanalysis and created surrealist art. Pailthorpe contributed to the International Surrealist Exhibition held in London during 1936 and also contributed to other Surrealist exhibitions and publications, such as the ''London Bulletin''. Her paintings and drawings were greatly praised by, among others,
André Breton
André Robert Breton (; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'' (''Manifeste du surréalisme'') o ...
. In 1938 Pailthorpe published ''The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism'' which was not well received by other British Surrealist artists. In this, and later works, she put forward the theory that surrealism and psychoanalysis were both means to personal liberation and the development of artistic creativity and freedom of expression. She and Mednikoff undertook analysis of each other's art to determine the associations behind each image. Regarding this as an alternative to conventional analysis, they would swop the roles of patient and analyst between themselves every fortnight. Although Pailthorpe presented the results of these unorthodox studies in lectures to colleagues, the studies were not published during her lifetime. After a series of disagreements about organisation and exhibition spaces, Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were "formally" expelled from the
British Surrealist group
The British Surrealist Group was involved in the organisation of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.
The '' London Bulletin'' was published by the Surrealist Group in England, according to the June 1940 edition (nos. 18-19 ...
in 1940.
In July 1940, Pailthorpe and Mendnikoff left Britain for New York City before spending time in California. From September 1942 to April 1943 Pailthorpe worked at the Essondale Mental Health hospital in British Columbia and in 1944 she and Mednikoff had a joint exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. This exhibition which contained over eighty works was hugely influential in the development of surrealist art in western Canada. Alongside the exhibition Pailthorpe gave a number of talks on surrealism, one of which was broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The couple returned to England in March 1946 and from 1948 until 1952 Pailthorpe was a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Portman Clinic, with Mednikoff as her assistant. She also ran a School of Art Therapy from 1950 until 1958 when she moved to Sussex.
Death and legacy
Pailthorpe died in July 1971. In 1986, Leeds City Art Gallery included Pailthorpe in the major exhibition ''Angels of Anarchy - Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties'' and also in their 1992 exhibition ''Women Artists of the British Surrealist Movement, 1930-1990''. A joint retrospective with Mednikoff, ''Sluice Gates of the Mind'' was held at the same gallery in 1998. In 2021 exhibition, ''Fertile Spoon'', at the Bosse and Baum gallery showed works by Pailthorpe alongside works by the contemporary artist Mary Stephenson.