After Cecil: [original etching]

MADDOX, Imma

Publication Date: 2000

About this Item

100 x 125mm (plate area); very mildly creased. Edition limited to nine numbered copies, signed by the artist; undated but circa 2000. "I am a Maudsley babe," wrote Imma Maddox in "Schizzy", extracts from an unpublished memoir printed in Poetry Express 18 (2003). "After a breakdown at Oxford [where she was reading PPE] in 1974-5, I ended up at the Villa in the Maudsley Hospital. In Occupational Therapy I made a ball-gown to wear at the May Ball at Oxford. By the time I got back to Oxford I had grown a good six sizes bigger because of the medication. I never went to a May Ball." Imma Maddox was born Joanna Maddox in 1955, the daughter of (Sir) John Maddox, future Editor of Nature (1966-75, 1980-95), and his first wife Nancy, who died in 1960. Her cool realisation of her predicament as a schizophrenic, and her difficulties in performing as an artist in the conventional world, is immediately disarming. Helped notably by Sister Benedicta of All Saints' Convent, Oxford, and Sister Dorothy Bell, Principal of Digby Stuart College, Roehampton, where she learned to weave, Maddox contrived a modus vivendi, and set up home in Camberwell, south London. Her articulacy and gift for the telling image have made her a persuasive spokesman for the mentally ill. Seller Inventory # W100094

Bibliographic Details

Title: After Cecil: [original etching]

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: No Binding

Condition: Near Fine

Signed: Signed by Illustrator(s)