Found  /  Discovery

The Incredible Story of 'Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3'

In 1970, a hand-bound portfolio of nearly 300 drawings is found in a dumpster. It would take 41 years to identify the artist who drew them.

Edward spends less than two years at the School for the Feeble Minded before being transferred to Missouri State Hospital No. 3, where he would pass the next 40. He's diagnosed as learning disabled and schizophrenic, diagnoses his surviving nieces feel do not fit the man their family knew. (In 2011, Columbia University Professor Psychology Susan Scheftel posthumously diagnosed Deeds with an autism spectrum disorder, based on examination of his detailed and highly repetitive oeuvre.) The State Hospital was built in a fit of 19th century mental healthcare reform, but these better impulses have subsided by the time Deeds is a patient. The hospital, designed as a self-sufficient community where residents would reap the curative benefits of fresh air and honest labor, is overcrowded by more than 400 patients in 1930. It's fire unsafe, unsanitary, and understaffed. Patients are reportedly abused and even beaten, with one dying from such injuries during Deeds' tenure as a resident.

But despite the horrors that surround him, it's here that Deeds draws the works in his famous portfolio. The works themselves seem hardly related to life at the State Hospital. The people he depicts are dressed in the style of the 1900s, a time he’d barely remember, and the images suggest nothing of confinement, loneliness, or abuse. Instead, they take place in a tender world of their own, full of gentle ladies, mannerly gentlemen, verdant nature, and friendly-looking animals.

“A lot of this stuff is going to remain a mystery,” says Richard Goodman, author of the introduction to The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3, a new book that reprints the works in Deeds' manuscript. Deeds’ family knows that he draws, but don't discuss his art with him. “They didn't have conversations about, ‘Oh, Uncle Edward, why did you do this?’” says Goodman. The State Hospital where Deeds spent nearly all of his adult life has been leveled, leaving few clues of what his life there was like.

Despite the halcyon world Deeds depicts, embedded in his drawings are hints as to what life at the hospital entailed. Three pieces contain the letters ECT, which, according to Brynnan K. Light-Lewis, who in 2012 wrote a thesis on Deeds’ life and work, may refer to electroconvulsive therapy. It’s also known as electric shock treatment. ECT is introduced to Nevada State Hospital No. 3 during Deeds’ time there, and is administered twice weekly to the average patient. When Clay’s family’s monthly visits to the hospital falls on the heels of one of Edward’s treatments, they find their brother and uncle disoriented and dazed. Deeds leaves us a heartbreaking hint to his medical care at the hospital in the form of a a portrait of a top-hatted man that’s captioned with the phrase “WHY DOCTOR.” “I think that [art] was a coping mechanism,” says Light-Lewis. “He created a personal world for himself—an escape.”