James Edward Deeds Jr

1908-1987 · Nevada, Missouri, USA

A patient in a Missouri state hospital drew 283 gentle pictures of dandies, steamboats and wide-eyed girls and bound them as a gift for his mother. The album was rescued from a rubbish pile by a boy.

The life

Deeds was born in 1908 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father served as a navy paymaster, and grew up on the family farm near Ozark, Missouri. Life under a harsh, disciplinarian father went badly for him, and at 25 he was sent away to a state school; by his late twenties he was committed to State Hospital No. 3 in Nevada, Missouri, where he lived for nearly four decades before moving to a nursing facility in 1973. He died in 1987. His album of drawings, thrown out in 1970, was saved from the rubbish by a boy and surfaced 36 years later, reaching the collector Harris Diamant and publication as The Electric Pencil.

The work

Pencil and crayon on ledger sheets from the hospital: 283 drawings of nineteenth-century gentlemen and ladies, Civil War soldiers, steamboats, trains, animals and fanciful architecture, all in a becalmed, courtly stillness. The letters ECT surface in his ornate lettering, a quiet trace of the treatment he received. The drawings were exhibited at the American Folk Art Museum in 2018.

Why we love them

He drew a courteous, buttoned-up America that had vanished before he was born, from inside the place holding him. Tenderness as time travel.

Go deeper

• James Edward Deeds Jr at the Outsider Art Fair
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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