David Beales: archive

Material created and collated by David Beales, primarily relating to his art practice and writings. The archive includes the following: art produced by Beales, including digital pictures, sketchbooks, individual drawings and digital images of paintings; correspondence and papers regarding Beales' artistic outputs including exhibitions; drafts and manuscripts for various writings, with related correspondence; personal correspondence; scans of his clinical records; and reference material.

1979-2010s

6 boxes, 113 digital items, 291 drawings, 31 prints, 30 composite pictures, 22 sketchbooks, 5 paintings, 1 photograph, 1 collage

In 2017 Wellcome acquired a copy of Beales' published book The Road to the Asylum along with supplementary digital material, which were catalogued as MS.9225. During the cataloguing of PP/DBL it became clear that there was a lot of crossover with MS.9225 and the material in MS.9225 covered a wider range of Beales' work and life than just The Road to the Asylum. Therefore the decision was made to integrate MS.9225 into PP/DBL.

The archive is arranged in five sections:

Section A: Art - contains Beales' digital pictures, digital versions of paintings, sketchbooks and drawings and unfinished paintings. Finished paintings are catalogued as individual works (see "Related Material" below)

Section B: Exhibitions and other artistic outputs - contains material regarding the use of Beales' art, primarily in exhibitions but also in other projects and events

Section C: Writings - contains manuscripts, drafts and related papers for a variety of Beales' writings including his published books The Road to the Asylum and After the Asylum.

Section D: Reference material - secondary source material compiled by Beales

Section E: Personal papers - contains material concerning various aspects of Beales life, including digital correspondence and copies of Beales' medical records

Donated to Wellcome by David Beales in March 2019.

David Beales is an artist and writer. He was admitted to Farnborough Psychiatric Unit at the age of 21, and spent the next twenty years in and out of a number of different hospitals. In the early 1990s, he was discharged from Stone House Hospital as part of the Care in the Community initiative.

His art portrays the world of psychiatric patients, drug users, musicians and artists, and has been exhibited at Bethlem Museum of the Mind. His compositions are informed by real life events, and are seen by the artist as mapping an area of social history which is underrepresented.

Wellcome holds several of Beales' paintings, collages and prints of digital pictures.

Wellcome holds a number of Beales' self-published writen works.

CC-BY-NC David Beales

This collection has been catalogued and is available to library members. Some items have access restrictions which are explained in the item-level catalogue records.

The archive originally contained a lot of duplication. In order to combat anxiety that his work would be lost or destroyed, Beales deliberately created multiple copies of his work, particular his digital material in different file formats. For the most part, duplicates have been removed from the archive using the following criteria:

Where we hold a digital picture and a print of the picture we have only kept the digital version as Beales considers this to be the "master".

Where we hold a digital picture in multiple file formats we have kept the format used to create the work (often Photoshop) and retained one other copy in a non-proprietary format.

We have not retained digital copies of documents where we hold the original document

Where we hold multiple, we have retain one copy of a digital file