For most of 1974 Charlotte Johnson Wahl (by now the mother of four small children) was a patient at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital: she suffered from a severe and catastrophic hand-washing compulsion. ‘This emotionally painful period was artistically highly productive’ (exhibition catalogue), yet most of the eighty canvases Charlotte produced have been hidden away at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind for the last forty years. It Has Not Worked is there, along with the other extraordinary, overwhelming, unforgettable paintings of the Maudsley period of Charlotte’s life.