James Henry Pullen was a celebrity in his day. His most famous creation, a ten-foot model of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s ship the SS Great Eastern, won a prize at the Fisheries Exhibition of 1883, and his fantasy boats appeared at the Paris Exposition of 1867. He was visited by the Royal Family, appeared in Dickens’s All the Year Roundand was dubbed a ‘genius’ by the Harmsworth Magazine.
This exhibition, the first ever gallery show devoted to Pullen’s work, highlights a frequently unseen part of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century art world. Drawing on Pullen’s newly transcribed psychiatric case notes and in-depth research into his biographical and psychiatric context, it explores the life and imagination of an artist who became the archetype of the ‘savant’, a category with continuing resonance in how we conceptualise artists today.
To Book Tickets, Visit www.wattsgallery.org.uk
