Doctor Grace Winifred Pailthorpe

Doctor Grace Winifred Pailthorpe served with the French Red Cross during WW1. She is entitled to the British War and Victory Medals. What makes her story more interesting she was also an artist, a surrealist painter.

She was born in Sussex on July 29th, 1883

She trained for medicine, graduating as a M.B. and B.S. in 1914

1914-18 She served as Doctor with the French Red Cross and Scottish Women’s Hospitals, entering France in February 1915.

Her medals were sold at Dix Noonman in December 2012

1918-22 She worked as District Medical Officer in Western Australia

December 1921: She arrived in Vancouver, Canada on the Makura from Honolulu, Hawai

1922: She returned to England and took up the study of Psychological Medicine. She received her M.D. from the University of Durham in 1925.

1930: Her exhibits in the main Surrealist exhibitions and in 1938 publishes The Scientific Aspect of Surrealism which was probably instrumental in her expulsion from the group in 1940

1932 She published two books What we put in prison and in preventive and rescue homes and Studies in the Psychology of Delinquency. This brought her brought her worldwide acclaim. Her study of delinquency and sets up the first institute in the world devoted to the scientific treatment of delinquency, later known as the Portman Clinic

1935: She met Reuben Mednikoff and together they embark on psychological art research. She began her research into automatic drawing and painting. In her article The scientific aspect of surrealism she argued that the final goals of surrealism and psychoanalysis were the same: the liberation of the individual. Through surrealist techniques unconscious fantasies could be set free and subsequently reintegrated with the conscious. They have been qualified as one of the strangest and eeriest couples in British art

In 1936 she took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, where her work from a series titled The Ancestors was greatly admired by André Breton.

One of her painting done in 1937

During the Second World War, she and her husband lived in Vancouver, Canada, where she worked as a psychoanalyst.

July 29th, 1940: She arrived in Liverpool, England on the Britanic from New-York, United States

1941: In her paper Deflection of energy, as a result of birth trauma was published, in which she pleaded for greater attention to be paid to the trauma of birth in the analysis.

In 1947 she returned to England and practiced at the beginning of the 1950s as a psychoanalyst in London. In later years her painting turned to Eastern mysticism – to the detriment of surrealism, because she bequeathed her large collection of surrealist art to a yoga society, which burned it.

She initiated the establishment of the world’s first clinic for the psychological treatment of prison inmates. Soon after the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency was formed – now known as the Portman Clinic.
from 1940 to 1971 She continued her painting and research in combination with Reuben Mednikoff until their deaths within six months of each other in 1971

She died in July 1971 at the age of 87 years.