Two Acclaimed 'Psychic Artists': Frank Leah and Coral Polge

Many examples of Frank Leah's psychic drawings (with photographs for comparison) are presented in the case study Faces of the Living Dead (1943) by Paul Miller.

 

 

Editions of Maurice Barbanell's memoirs as a Spiritualist journalist include a chapter about psychic artist Frank Leah (1886-1972).  While the 'psychic' drawings of Coral Polge (1924-2001) are similar to those of Frank, her talent and psychic ability is articulated very differently in her autobiography The Living Image (1984 coauthored by Kay Hunter / updated and republished as Living Images 1991).  Each artist's own perspective of their mentality as a medium is subjective to individual perception and expression.  Maurice referred to people in the afterlife 'showing' themselves to Frank.  Left unexpressed is the reality that each 'communicator' is subject to an omnipresent 'Life Force' or 'supernormal intelligences' (words used in his book Forewords) in the ascended realm of existence and this Force/'Oneness' is eternally interacting with all life forms on Earth and in the realms beyond.

The following profile of Frank Leah is from Power of the Spirit (1949) and the concluding paragraph is from This Is Spiritualism (1959). 

This photo of Frank Leah is from the 1995 edition of Faces of the Living Dead.

. . . Frank Leah has been exercising his unique gift, which combines clairvoyance and artistry, for twenty years.  He told me that he has portrayed many thousands of dead men, women and children.  In nearly every case, the drawings have been identified.

Leah is definitely unusual.  He lives in a world of his own, has the artistic temperament, which makes him become heated over matters that others might dismiss, and possesses a volubility that has to be heard to be appreciated.

He has been clairvoyant since he was a child.  At first, he was scared of the forms he could see but which were invisible to others.  He was mystified as to who these forms were, until gradually it dawned on him that they belonged to those the world calls dead.  For many years, he followed the normal vocations of being a journalist and a cartoonist until, one day, he decided to combine all his gifts.

He now lives a lonely life, with simplicity as the dominant motif, and gives the world permanent records of Survival by drawing the dead people who constantly present themselves to his vision.  In the early days of his mediumship, he received sitters, who always came anonymously, after they had made appointments through Spiritualist societies.  Now the usual method is for a prospective sitter to telephone him and for Leah to begin sketching a dead relative who is connected with the telephone caller, even though no names are mentioned.  While he is making the sketch, Leah gives a running commentary of evidence from the spirit communicator, so that recognition is complete even before the sitter has seen the portrait.

The sitter is then asked to visit Leah in his London studio.  When he arrives he finds, in many cases, that the drawing has been completed.  The artist may have asked the sitter to bring a photograph so that a comparison could be made.

On many occasions, Leah has foreknowledge of the telephone call.  He awakens to see a spirit face in front of him.  By clairaudience, he is able to maintain a conversation with the other-world visitor and glean information as to who he is and why he has returned.


. . . He feels the torture of every illness, sickness, disease, all the pains from which the dead suffered before being finally freed from earth.  They will often impress on him, for the purpose of identification, incidents connected with their lives ten, twenty, thirty and forty years ago.  Occasionally, these incidents are given in remarkable detail.  A woman once showed herself wearing the dress in which she was presented to Queen Victoria.  The artist saw the whole court scene, thronged with its eager attendants.

Leah maintains that there is nothing ghostly or eerie about these spirit visitors.  He does not see them as phantoms, wraths or transparent figures.  They look solid.  They are alive and intensely vital.  He can walk round them as though they were living persons on earth, just as if they were models posing for an artist.  They will stand still while he takes a note of their shape, proportions and any other identifiable details.

When they are experienced communicators, they show themselves very clearly.  Leah is able to see every line and wrinkle, the colour of the eyes and hair, and even to notice individual characteristics, such as a mole or a broken tooth.  Usually, they give the kind of information about themselves that produces speedy recognition, unusual names, the towns in which they lived and their professions.

He is not in trance when he executes these drawings.  He is quite normal.  The outstanding feature is the speed with which they are done.  Once, he finished a complete drawing in nine seconds.  Thirty seconds is fairly common when dealing with good communicators, and generally the time taken is from three to five minutes.

The drawings are always life-size.  They are done in daylight in his studio, but occasionally he has made a sketch on top of a London bus.

Recently, when Mrs. Margaret Lyon, the Glasgow healer, visited London, I suggested that she should telephone Leah in the hope of obtaining a drawing of her guide, Kahesdee, who has been instrumental in helping so many sufferers.  She called Lead at his flat, but there was no reply.  The next day, she telephoned him again.  They had never met.  All that he could have known, from the ordinary point of view, was that the person speaking at the other end of the line was a woman with a Scottish accent.  She deliberately refrained from giving any name.

"Are you seeking a guide or a relative?" he asked.  She answered that she left it entirely to him as to who manifested.  The evidence came in a stream.  Leah described the three guides who work with Mrs. Lyon and laid stress on the last, her Japanese woman doctor.  He described her appearance and age, saying at first that she was an Oriental and finally mentioning the correct nationality.  That did not complete the story.  He went on to tell Mrs. Lyon that her husband was standing beside her.  This was true.  Next came the artist's statement that the dead father of the husband had now shown himself and that Leah was making a sketch of him.  An appointment was made for Mr. and Mrs. Lyon to see Leah the next day.  When they arrived, they were confronted by two portraits—her beloved Japanese guide and his dead father.

In one case that I know, Leah made seven portraits of a communicator, ranging from his early childhood to his old age.  By an extraordinary chance, the family were able to find seven photographs which compared with the artist's portraits.

Here is another example of the accuracy of Leah's mediumship.  Before one sitting, Leah's studio was filled with the pungent odour of cigar smoke.  The smell was so strong and  persistent that others who came in afterwards asked, "Who has been smoking cigars?"

Leah appreciated the significance of this happening.  It meant that when the communicator lived on earth he must have been constantly smoking cigars.  Turning to a woman visitor who had come anonymously, Leah said, "That's your husband."  Next, the artist saw, in a vision, the man driving a car, with his wife by his side.  Then something happened quickly.  The husband was flung through the windscreen on to what appeared to be a bank and was killed outright.  "That is how my husband passed on," the woman said.  The communicator insisted that Leah should draw a caricature of him with a cigar in his mouth before he would allow a serious portrait to be made.  Clairvoyantly, the artist was taken away from the seance room until he found himself in familiar surroundings.

"I know that place," he said.  "It's Daly's Theatre . . . I am in the orchestra . . . I am conducting. . . . That was his job."  Here the medium raised his hands as if they held a baton and went through the motions of conducting an orchestra.  Next, he was able to tell the woman the exact date of her husband's passing.  Finally, he did a serious drawing in contrast to the caricature.

"Everything you have told me is quite correct," said the delighted woman.  "My husband, Thomas N. Turnbridge, was the conductor at Daly's Theatre under the management of George Edwardes."

Leah's communicators have included people of many nationalities.  I remember seeing the psychic drawing of a Persian Moslem who gave his name in Persian and, to indicate that he was a follower of Mahomet, referred to Mecca.  Further, he gave the name of the town of Kierbeleh, near Baghdad, where his body was buried.  After showing himself as he usually looked on earth, he depicted his likeness during the illness he endured before his passing, showing even the icebag he had on his head.

I was instrumental in being the means by which a mother received great comfort when Leah drew her six-year-old child.  The girl, Shirley Ann Woods, suffered from a rare disease which defied all medical skill.  When she passed on, her parents were stricken with grief.


When I was introduced to Mrs. Woods, we had a discussion on Spiritualism, which resulted in her determination to inquire for herself.  She began very wisely by reading psychic literature and soon, at a series of seances, she received sufficient evidence from her child to assure her that Survival was a fact.  All the time, her husband, with his mathematical brain, coldly analysed all the evidence, acting as a restraining influence, so that his wife should be certain there was no alternative explanation.

At my suggestion she telephoned Leah without disclosing her name.  He told her at once that she sought a portrait of her child.  He gave a perfect description of Shirley Ann, commenting on her character, appearance, hair and complexion.  By the time the artist had finished, the mother was convinced that Leah was really looking at her dead daughter.  Later, when she called at his studio, she was overjoyed with the splendid likeness of her daughter which he had portrayed.

This is one of those rare cases where there was no comparative photograph, for the mother did not possess a picture taken at the age at which Shirley Ann showed herself to the artist.  Mrs. Woods asked her husband to call at the studio, and he too was impressed by the portrait.  In his presence, Leah did a second portrait with added details of the daughter's appearance.  In both drawings the child was shown wearing a plaid frock.  Later, Mr. and Mrs. Woods actually showed me this frock, which they had kept.

The sequel to the story is that not long afterwards Mrs. Woods had a sitting with Estelle Roberts and through this medium the child referred to the portraits Leah had done.  As the mother had not mentioned this fact to Estelle, it was a striking confirmation.

In one or two cases, Leah has not only made portraits, but has exhibited his skill as a sculptor by modelling a bust of the communicator.  The most recent development is for him to complete the psychic portrait in colour, which, of course, enables the sitters to have a permanent, life-like reproduction.


Leah is at pains to make it clear that he depends on the co-operation of the communicators.  He cannot command them to appear.  A wealthy widow, who was very anxious to have  an oil painting of her deceased husband, offered him a commission of six hundred guineas.  Nothing would have pleased Leah more than to accept it, but the husband refused to show himself, although he did not mind talking to the artist.  Because he detested it, he had always refused to be photographed.

An example of Frank Leah's work is included at the end of the blog article "Excerpts from There Is Life After Death".  A previous article mentioning Coral Polge is "Some Recordings of Channeling".  Considering the diverse range of phenomena witnessed in mediumship cases, one series of seances held where artistic renderings of people were materialized is the topic of the article "Phenomena of Materialization".

 Coral Polge: "1978—Receiving the Spiritualist of the Year Award."

 

In Coral Polge's autobiography originally entitled The Living Image, the story of her life is told.  After two childhood 'out-of-body' experiences and learning that her mother's arthritis was helped by a spiritual healer, Coral attended a Spiritualist Church service and was startled when the medium came to her and said, "Do you know you are a psychic artist?"  Upon further investigation, the initial stage of Coral's psychic mediumship encompassed automatic writing that gave her instructions for her future work.

After the automatic writing came automatic drawing.  At first it was not even drawing, but a series of lines, circles, waves, and funny meaningless shapes.  It gradually became obvious that my spirit communicators were trying to get the "feel" of a material channel, rather as a child has to learn to hold and manipulate a pencil.  At that stage their creations were not meant to make sense.  Gradually, understandable images began to emerge, even though they were not brilliantly artistic.  One was a portrait of Yo San, the Chinese artist who professed to be working with me.

'Yo San Loo' was "doorkeeper" (1, 2, 3) among a succession of 'guides' identified during the course of her career.  Early in this sequence of events, 'Tommaso di Giovanni' is described as being "one of several artists who, over the years, have been willing to return to guide my hand and eventually produce some 2,000 to 3,000 pictures each year."  Coral explained further:

These artists seem to come and go, some only working on one or two portraits while others remain constant helpers.  They do not take complete control of my hand, possibly using my mind in some subtle way , and so influencing the choice of colour and positioning of line.

My most frequent helper now is the French pastel portrait artist, Maurice de la Tour, who began to make his presence felt some twenty years ago.  Being a critical man he had obviously delayed using me until my own abilities had considerably improved.  Over a period of several years other mediums had described this Frenchman, dressed in 18th century style, with wig and lace ruffles.  Eventually I managed to sketch a portrait of him, but at that time I had still only established that his Christian name was Maurice.  No further information was known.  Shortly afterwards a book came into my hands, apparently quite by chance, and there among the illustrations was a self-portrait of the laughing-eyed Frenchman.  He was instantly recognizable as "my" Maurice, and there too was the rest of his name; he was Maurice de la Tour. 

Coral mentioned that her husband Arthur attended a Leslie Flint Direct Voice seance and the voice of 'Maurice de la Tour' was heard to affirm an involvement with her work.
 
Considering the gamut of mediumship cases (profiled in many preceding blog articles), one should understand that it is the omnipresent spiritual Force comprehensible through such terms as 'God' and 'Christ Consciousness' that determines the 'guardian angels'/'controls' or 'guides' for each person during an Earth incarnation.

"Two portraits drawn for Kay Hunter, who immediately recognised her father, and her maternal grandmother, Jessie Monteith Traynor.  Their photographs are also shown."

 

In her autobiography Coral Polge wrote about the early stage of her artistry and about her awareness of Frank Leah.

Among the automatic writings was a statement to the effect that one day I would take Frank Leah's place in Spiritualism.  Leah was a brilliant portrait artist and psychic.  Most of his portraits were of relatives and friends of his sitters—far more evidential than anything I was producing at that time.  But one day perhaps . . . I thought hopefully.


In the meantime I was only drawing spirit guides.  Wondering why it was only Spiritualists and not other religions which seemed to have guides, I came to the conclusion that it was all a question of labels.  "Guardian angels" seems to be a Christian term . . .


In time, instructions were given by my communicators to begin work in public, requesting a group of spiritual healers at the local church to sit for me.  This, I was informed, would bring in further work, but under no circumstances was advertising allowed. "If the work is not coming to you, then it is not of the standard expected," I was told.  They were, as always, blunt and to the point in their wisdom.  As promised, requests for pictures began to snowball, setting me on a path which was to change my whole way of life.

Coral attended a public demonstration by Frank Leah in 1957, about five or six years after beginning her own psychic work.

. . . he had made his preliminary contacts with recipients by telephone, gaining impressions simply from the voice, and making quick sketches.  He took these pictures to the hall where the demonstration was held, and finished off the portraits on the platform.  The accuracy of his work was extraordinary and I had a great admiration for him.  It was therefore a great thrill when I was introduced to him by journalist Bill Leach, and invited to his studio.  His advice was that if I studied a lot more, I might eventually make the grade, and to have encouragement of this kind from the great man was something I valued greatly.

Coral commented about her mental state while creating a psychic drawing:

Although working with a spirit artist who helps me to portray these people, to a large extent I have to be very aware of the person being drawn.  I must feel like them and almost become them, putting down that impression.  When the picture is accurate there is a sense of looking in a mirror, the portrait reflecting back to me what I am actually feeling.  I can sense the structure of the face over my own, and can share the subject's character and personality, sometimes even experiencing the conditions under which they pass to the spirit world.

Coral regularly worked in tandem with other mediums — "While I drew, another medium would give clairvoyance, linking the picture with the recipient."  When Coral appeared at the huge Albert Hall, an overhead projector was utilized with Coral successfully implementing a fine felt-tipped pen on "a slippery sheet of plastic."  The pen was indelible so no mistake could be made.

Coral reported that her clients didn't always receive a picture of the person they wanted.  There were many "unknown pictures, identified later by relatives or friends . . . A recent portrait proved to be the sitter's step-daughter's husband's father, whom my client had never meant.  Telepathy [merely between client and Coral] would mean far more satisfied clients; they would get whom they wished for, but that is not usually the case."

. . . portraits have often taken long and devious routes before finding the correct recipient.  It is quite extraordinary how in most instances they eventually reach the right destination, perhaps having been unrecognized for months or even years.  One portrait took fifteen years before it was positively identified.  And it happened in a way which makes one wonder whether there is any such thing as coincidence.

The autobiography recounts a diverse variety of psychic experiences related to Coral's artistic renderings while interacting with the public.  Coral's first publicity in the national English press occurred when Maurice Barbanell decided to feature one of her drawings in an article for Illustrated, a popular weekly magazine.  She found the attention "flattering and exciting" and she wrote: "I was not prepared for the repercussions.  Letters began to flood in from all parts of the country, even from overseas."

In 1964, Coral married spiritual healer Tom Johanson "who was connected with a spiritual centre which he was eventually to run, the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain in Belgrave Square in London."  [The Association had formerly been located at Russell Square in Holborn.]

Examples of the art of Coral Polge may be seen at tomjohanson.com among other websites.  In the video "Coral Polge - Psychic Art" she is heard to declare: "The important part of mediumship, as I see it, is purely to introduce people to something far more advanced, far more spiritual . . . As we come to the end of this age into the Aquarian Age—an age of change and new beginnings—then we shall all begin to develop that hidden talent within us and people like myself will be unnecessary.  And if we follow our path wisely and well, then we shall all be our own medium."