Life

In April 1918, Detmold was released from a Home Office labour camp to work for J. M. Dent, painting illustrations for W. H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village . This chapter uses a recently unearthed cache of letters between Detmold and Dent to shed light on Detmold’s life and personality as he embarked on a fresh phase of artistic creativity. In addition to creating his nature illustrations, immediately after the First World War, Detmold experimented with a range of artistic forms and wrote three little books of mystical aphorisms – Life (1921), Selflessness (1922) and Greater Things, and a Greater Than Things (1923), all published by Dent. Detmold’s mysticism was part of an interwar current of social critique which saw a path to a better world, not by collective political action, but by the striving of individuals to recreate their own lives through meditation and other spiritual practices.