An emotionally charged painting that offers a glimpse into the private childhood world of the prime minister and his young siblings is to play a key part in a new exhibition about the pain of grappling with mental illness away from the family home.
The frank and poignant work, Where is Mama? by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, Boris Johnson’s late mother, is to hang alongside paintings by artists that include Louis Wain and Richard Dadd. The exhibition, A way from home: Bethlem artists on longing and belonging, opens next month at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, south-east London, in galleries housed in the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital. Among the arresting images, each of which tells a story of loss and treatment, is the painting made by Wahl in 1974, while still married to Stanley Johnson and separated from her four young children – Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo.
