Rachel, the journalist and TV panel show guest – catchphrase, “don’t call me Boris’s sister!” – Leo, a presenter on Radio 4, and his politician brother and youngest sibling Jo. And while almost everyone would recall Stanley Johnson, the PM’s father, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! camp mate and friend of Georgia Toffolo, most people outside the Westminster bubble would ­struggle to name Boris’s mother, who ­suffered from Parkinson’s disease for almost half her life before dying “suddenly and peacefully” on Monday at the age of 79 in a London hospital.

But Charlotte Johnson Wahl not only raised four extraordinary children, including a future Prime Minister, she overcame debilitating mental illness and was a prominent artist in her own right. Yet little is known about her compared to her headline-grabbing family.

Described by one friend as having a “desire to be all things to all people”, it seemed that Charlotte spent her life blending into the background of someone else’s painting, first her ­husband Stanley’s and then her children’s.

Indeed, this is how she portrayed herself in one of the 80 paintings she did during treatment for what her daughter once described as ­“galloping obsessive compulsive disorder” at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in 1974.

Charlotte stayed there for nine months after a breakdown. She was 32 with four small children – Jo was only two – and was too ill to care for them.

She later said of that time: “My husband and I were not making each other happy, to put it mildly. It was ghastly, terrible.”

In fact, a biography of the Prime Minister claimed his parents’ marriage became “irredeemably fractured” due to Stanley’s “neglect and philandering’’. The Gambler, by Tom Bower, alleged that doctors spoke to Stanley “about his abuse”, while the ­couple’s children were told that a car door had accidentally hit their mother in the face.

Charlotte herself told how she required hospital treatment after the incident in the 1970s. Bower quotes her as saying: “He broke my nose. He made me feel like I deserved it.”

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It was alleged that the injury happened when she was suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and had “flailed” at Stanley, who broke her nose when “flailing back”. Now 81, Stanley is said to have deeply regretted the incident and denied he had been violent on any other occasion.

Charlotte’s friend, the art curator Nell Butler, who was the first person to collect and catalogue her work (2,000 pieces over her career) for a 2015 exhibition, described her as self-deprecating – not an adjective often attributed to the Johnson clan.

When Nell revealed that she was writing a newspaper article about her and her art, Charlotte exclaimed: “Heavens, girl, what will you find to say?”

And perhaps that is the nub of it; ­surrounded by such a noisy, attention- seeking family, Charlotte would have had to shout very loud to be heard, and that was not in her nature.

One of five children, jammed between two gifted siblings – “My older sister was terribly clever, as was my younger brother. My parents didn’t know what to do with me” – Charlotte received little or no formal art training but was given oil paints by her highly academic parents at the age of five.

“I turned out to be good at it,” she said. “Once I started I couldn’t stop. It was the only attention I got except when I was bad.”

Born Charlotte Offlow Fawcett in Oxford, she was the daughter of liberal intellectuals Beatrice and Sir James Fawcett, a barrister and member of the European Commission on Human Rights in the 1970s.

She was expelled from her Sussex convent at the age of 16 but still did well enough ­academically to get a place at Oxford University to read English. There, in the early 1960s, she met Stanley, a fellow Oxford undergraduate, at a lunch at All Souls College. Charlotte was there because her father was a college fellow and Stanley had just won a university poetry prize.

In an interview with Tatler magazine in 2015, Charlotte said: “I was engaged to somebody called Wynford Hicks, who was extraordinarily beautiful to look at but actually quite boring.

“Anyway, [after the meal] Stanley sent me a note asking if he could come to tea and go for a walk. So a few days later we went for a walk and he suddenly said, ‘Love is sweet. Revenge is sweeter far. To the Piazza. Ah ha ha har!’, which made me laugh so much I fell in love with him.”

Described by friends as “wild, ecstatic and impulsive” in those days, Charlotte was so besotted that she agreed, aged 21, to marry Stanley just months later. After their wedding in Marylebone, London, in 1963, she abandoned her own studies to follow her husband, a year older than her, to New York, where he studied economics at Columbia University.

The following year, Boris was born in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and even his choice of name – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – was typically unconventional.

Charlotte once said: “When I was three months pregnant, we travelled to Mexico City by Greyhound bus. It was very uncomfortable, I was desperately sick.

“We stayed with a man called Boris Litwin, who drew me aside and said, ‘You can’t travel back like this, here are two first-class air tickets.’ I was so grateful, I said, ‘Whatever the baby is, I shall call it Boris.’”

In fact, she called him Alexander Boris de Pfeffel. “At Eton, his friends discovered his foreign name and everyone started calling him Boris – even the beaks [teachers],” she recalled. “But everyone who’s known him since childhood calls him Alexander. If I were to call him Boris it would mean something was really serious.”

Charlotte had him baptised into her Catholic faith and although he was later ­confirmed into the Anglican Church as a teenager at Eton, the Prime Minister was, thanks to his mother, allowed to marry Catholic Carrie Symonds at Westminster Cathedral despite being twice-divorced.

In 1964, Charlotte returned to Oxford to finish her degree, the first married female undergraduate at her college, Lady Margaret Hall, where they insisted on calling her Miss Fawcett, although she was a married mother-of-one, and pregnant with Rachel.

“I’d write essays by putting Boris on the floor next to me and giving him a saucepan and a wooden spoon,” Charlotte recalled. “I’d take him to tutorials and leave him in the don’s garden in a pram. If it was raining I was sometimes allowed to leave the pram in the hall.”

In 1967, Charlotte gave birth to Leo and after four years of crossing the Atlantic to visit Stanley, the Johnsons settled on his Exmoor family farm.

But Stanley promptly took another job abroad following Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, and was one of the first Britons sent to Brussels.

Rachel Johnson once wrote: “My father started saving the world, one long trip to the third world at a time, leaving my mother on her own in a primitive cottage in an isolated hill farm in a remote river valley on Exmoor with three children.

“She still has a card that Boris wrote to her saying, ‘Mama we are sory (sic) we were so bad today’. Boris and I would trudge up and down the farm track with her twice a day and then we’d be picked up in a Land Rover and taken to school.” Charlotte recalled: “My daily school run was seven miles pushing a pram up and down a rutted track. I was on my own. Nobody ever called.”

The family moved again in 1973, to join Stanley in Brussels, one of more than 30 moves in 14 years. It may have been those years spent protecting his mother from a difficult, often lonely life, that prompted a seven-year-old Boris to voice his desire to be “world king” when he grew up.

In Brussels, Charlotte was back on the social carousel.

“My parents were the toast of the city,” recalled Rachel, “they were glamorous, funny and attractive. They could have gone out every night. As I recall, they did.”

But the pressure of this lifestyle was ­taking its toll and by 1974, Charlotte had a full-blown mental health crisis.

As Nell put it: “It is not clear what triggered the breakdown but there is no doubt she was overloaded. In the space of 10 years she had married, finished her degree and given birth to four children. Stanley was travelling – winning scholarships, joining think tanks, writing research papers – and he moved the family across countries and continents with him. In every new location he and Charlotte would socialise like mad.

“She became increasingly anxious and it was a short hop from anxiety into illness. She adopted a whole set of compulsive rituals so severe that her hands bled from constant washing.”

Charlotte knew “it was crackers but I ­simply couldn’t stop,” she said later. “And knowing how ridiculous it was only made things worse.”

Up until then, her painting had kept her on an even keel, but the mechanism failed. “I had to go into hospital,” she said afterwards. “I lost it. I went bonkers.”

That period produced arguably some of her best work, including “Patients Going to the Canteen” in which Charlotte has painted herself as a solitary figure walking against the flow, weeping.

Until the exhibition, her work hung in the dining rooms and studies of friends and family. Boris and his ex-wife, barrister Marina Wheeler, had several and Rachel has spoken fondly of a painting of her father by her mother which hangs by her desk.

Charlotte and Stanley’s gilded position at the heart of London’s social scene yielded some of her most famous subjects: Joanna Lumley, Jilly Cooper and Sir Ewen Fergusson, the Scottish rugby union international and diplomat.

On her release from the Maudsley after taking part in some experimental treatment for OCD (which was little understood in those days), Charlotte started to get better.

The children got scholarships and went away to boarding schools and she and Stanley divorced in 1979. He married publishing editor Jennifer Kidd in 1981 and they have two children, Julia, an author and musician, and Maximillian, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur.

Charlotte moved into a flat, refused to accept money from Stanley and later recalled being “very hard up”, selling paintings to make ends meet.

Then she met and married the American professor Nicholas Wahl in 1988 and moved to New York, returning to Britain eight years later following his death from cancer.

Charlotte was only 40 when she was ­diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but she continued to paint almost until her death.

In an interview in 2008, she said: “I try to paint every day if I possibly can, though my arm will suddenly do a movement which is completely unintentional and that almost brings me to tears.”

She was rather surprised to find that despite her wealthy socialist roots, she was surrounded by Conservatives. “I find it extraordinary that I should have married a Tory and have four Tory children,” she once said. “I’ve never voted Tory in my life.”

Her paintings remain for her children a reminder of the pivotal role she played in their success.

“I love almost all my mother’s pictures on principle but I always felt she painted other people’s children and my brothers with a fonder eye than she painted me,” said Rachel. “I’m lucky she painted me — or anything — at all, and so is the world. I am so proud to be able to call the artist Charlotte Johnson my mother.”

The Prime Minister described his mother as the “supreme authority” in the family and credited her with instilling in him the equal value of every human life.

Her friend Nell went one step further: “Charlotte Johnson is without doubt the most talented of the highly talented Johnson clan. And I’m determined the whole world should know.”

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