British Outsider Art

Andrew Kennedy


Andrew Kennedy was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Asylum on May 10, 1877. A fifty-two-year-old man of Presbyterian religion, he had previously worked as a joiner in Ayr and had been ill for five years. On entering the asylum, he was noted to ‘labour under delusions of a religious nature and also of exaltation’. He would stand for hours at the window, preaching to imaginary people, and he continually wrote letters. In January 1878 he was taken from the asylum by his brother, only to be admitted to Crichton Royal Hospital in November of the following year. It was here, in April 1882, that his drawing was first mentioned by staff, who noted: ‘He writes a great deal of rambling nonsense, illustrated by designs of his own.’ According to surviving hospital records, Kennedy left the Crichton in July 1884 and was re-admitted to the Glasgow Royal Asylum in January 1896, where he was noted to be ‘of unsound mind, having delusions of a religious and sexual nature which he expresses more in writing and in the pictures hhe draws than by words’. He remained there until his death in 1899. Kennedy’s extraordinary drawings are likely to have been kept by doctors, not for their artistic merit but as examples of psychopathology, used as visual material in lectures to illustrate different forms of psychosis. Case notes suggest that Kennedy produced an enormous body of work. Just thirty-four drawings remain intact, mostly on small pieces of paper apparently cut from the pages of books or magazines and featuring recurring themes of doctors and dragons, with men and women sprouting branch-like wings. The texts that run alongside Kennedy’s drawings go hand in hand with them and reveal glimpses of his thoughts and imaginings.

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