Oil on canvas

The Night Watch (fragment).

Originally almost the same size (304 x 426 cm) as Rembrandt’s painting of the same name before being cut to manageable size by the artist, The Night Watch was the centrepiece of the Mental Handicap Project in 1976 and was unveiled by Plymouth’s Lord Mayor, Arthur Floyd. Concealed behind a vast curtain at one end of the warehouse studio Jacob’s Ladder, this deliberately invoked the great unveiling scene in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film Rembrandt, which had first inspired Lenkiewicz to become a painter when he saw it on television as a boy.

Mrs Dempster with Russell.

Appears in Mother and Child Care in Art (2007), Emery, Alan E.H, Emery, Marcia L. H., London, Royal Society of Medicine Press Ltd. p56-57. ISBN 1-85315-629-9.

Note: Listed as No. 31 Mrs Dempster with child in the 1980 retrospective list.

Anita and Julie Rabey with their mother.

Nicky Wilkinson and his father.

Barbara Bridgeman with self portrait. (To be completed).

Fragment. The left-hand section of this painting, which showed the work in progress Self-Portrait (after Franz Xaver Messcherschmidt), has been removed.

Boy with cerebral palsy.

Inscribed: Study – Lenkiewicz, painted from a photograph by Hans de Rijke.

Wally Carter with his son Martin John.

Mark Bridgeman on the studio chair.

Barbara, Carol and Mark Bridgeman.

Barbara Bridgeman and Caroline Young.

The original concept of the Mental Handicap Project exhibited in 1976 was as one of four parts of a series on ‘Relationships: Attitudes Towards Love’ titled Love and Tragedy. Lenkiewicz’s continuing interest was in the disadvantaged and ostracized sections of society. He started a large notebook on the history of mental and physical disability, including many detailed pen and ink drawings. These were often based on Velázquez’s paintings of the jesters and dwarfs in the seventeenth century court of Philip IV of Spain.

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