The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

Abstract

states often invoked in discussions of the magic lantern show to which the term literally refers. 9 Three are preserved at the Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability, along with several drawings. The most significant of the latter is Pullen's Pictorial Autobiography (plate 2), a sequence of forty-one visual panels recalling Pullen's life and work up to 1878, the probable date of its creation. Though it is drawn, rather than written, the Pictorial Autobiography is at once a 'patient record' of the kind Roy Porter described in his Social History of Madness, and an almost unique example of an autobiographical narrative from someone identified specifically not as a lunatic, but as an idiot. 10 Many of Pullen's other creations, though significantly excepting the Pictorial Autobiography, were photographed and discussed in their time, along with the Great Eastern, but they, like Pullen himself, have been generally absent both from histories of nineteenth-century art generally, and from specific discussions about historical artists with disabilities. 11 Perhaps more surprisingly, Pullen has also been largely omitted from the discourse surrounding 'outsider art', a term often used to refer to untrained and/ or institutionalized artists, which has been gathering momentum since its first coinage by Roger Cardinal in 1972. 12 This may reflect Pullen's historical position. Originally simply a translation of 'art brut', the nomenclature used by the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) to refer to his own collection of work 'emanating from obscure personalities, maniacs […] animated by fantasy, even delirium, and strangers to the beaten track of catalogued art', the designation 'outsider art' is usually applied to artists