Explore through artist
Mary Kessell
'What drawings and paintings. People of all types & nations, horses, soldiers, children, lines of washing, refugees playing musical instruments, lonely folk with their arms on window ledges gazing into space, more washing.'
Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945
charcoal, Imperial War Museum
Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945
charcoal, Imperial War Museum
Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945
charcoal, Imperial War Museum
Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945
charcoal, Imperial War Museum
Born 13 November 1914 in London, Mary Kessell was primarily known as a painter of figure subjects, decorations and for the book illustrations she did throughout her life. She studied at both the Clapham School of Art and the Central School of Art in London.
Mary Kessell was one of only three female official war artists to work outside Britain during the Second World War. She spent six months in Germany in 1945, where she did drawings of what she witnessed in Belsen, Hamburg and Berlin.
Her experience of Belsen differed markedly from that of artists such as Cole, Zinkeisen and Taylor, as she arrived a full four months after liberation. By this time, Belsen had been transformed into a holding place for displaced persons, many of them Belsen survivors, waiting to return home.
Mary Kessell produced a series of drawings, 'Notes from Belsen Camp, 1945', and wrote an extensive diary about her experiences in Germany.
After the war, she returned to London and began to teach drawing and design at the London School of Printing and Graphic Art in 1957. Mary Kessell died in 1978.
