Cecil Collins, R.A.

Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London, where acquired by Mrs H. N. Brailsford
Sale, Phillips London, 13th September 1988, lot 142
Offer Waterman & Co., London, where acquired by the family of the present owner

London, Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, Cecil Collins, February 1944, cat. no.11;
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Cecil Collins A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Tapestries from 1928-1959, November - December 1959, cat. no.25;
London, Tate, Cecil Collins A Retrospective Exhibition, 10th May - 9th July 1989, cat. no.22;
Dartington, High Cross House, Cecil Collins: The Dartington Years 1936-1943, August - September 1997, un-numbered exhibition, illustrated.

Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins: The Painter's Subject, Holywell Press, Oxford, 1946, illustrated p.17;
Bernard Denvir, John Singer (ed.), Contemporary British Landscape Paintings, The Holiday Book, William McLellan, Glasgow, 1946, illustrated pl.IX;
Brian Keeble (ed.), Cecil Collins The Vision of the Fool and Other Writings, Golgonooza Press, Ipswich, 1994, p.149, illustrated pl.5;
Nomi Rowe (intro.), In Celebration of Cecil Collins, Visionary Artist and Educator, Foolscap, London, 2008, illustrated p.67.

Original canvas. There are some very minor areas of abrasion and some associated flecks of paint loss at the extreme edges of the composition. On close examination it is possible to see some fine lines of paint cracking, predominately in the lower half of the composition, with a further small crack in the raised impasto in the upper right quadrant. There is some light surface dirt across the piece. With the exception of the above the work appears to be in good and stable condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a small area of florescence in the green pigment at the top of the trees. The work is float mounted in a painted wooden frame with a linen wrapped mount. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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‘My works are visual music of the kingdoms of the imagination. There is in all human beings a secret, personal life – untouched, protected, won from communal life. It is this sensitive life which my art is created to feed and sustain: this real life deep in each person.’

Cecil Collins, introduction to the catalogue of his exhibition at The Bloomsbury Gallery, London, 1935

 Cecil Collins belongs to a long and distinguished line in British art that runs from William Blake to Samuel Palmer, through Collins’ contemporaries Stanley Spencer and Edward Burra, and on even to the early, haunting works of Lucian Freud. All of these artists can be considered ‘magic realists’, working long before this idea was applied to the writing of the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. And it is a distinctly ‘English Magic’ – to borrow the title of Jeremy Deller’s presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2013, itself a nod to this unique sensibility that combines the pastoralist and the Socialist, the ancient and the modern – Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’ with its ‘dark satanic mills’.

Collins grew up in the West Country, a landscape scored with ancient ley-lines and mysterious standing stones and steeped in myth (the subject of a recent Tate exhibition – The Dark Monarch: Magic & Modernity in British Art, 2009-2010), from which he inherited a vast and varied body of symbols, stories and beliefs, all of which he incorporated into his work. Having arrived in London to study at the Royal College of Art, he began to weave these home-grown metaphysical influences into the forms and ideas of the international avant-garde, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and Giorgio de Chirico, whose work students at the College devoured through magazines and occasional forays to Paris. As well as the Modern, Collins looked deep into the past for inspiration, especially in literary traditions, from the Bible to Byzantine legends, to the works of Shakespeare and, of course, the poetry of William Blake. 

Following on from the success of his one-man show at The Bloomsbury gallery in 1935, Collins’ work, was included in the highly significant International Surrealist Exhibition in London in June 1936 (alongside Graham Sutherland's Thunder Sounding, see lot 129), at the specific request of Sir Herbert Read. Yet he felt he did not quite belong within the confines of such a group, and soon shook off the label, instead preferring to explore (mytho) poetic consciousness in art on his own terms. This desire to find his own path – as the poet Robert Frost would later eloquently put it, ‘the road less travelled by’ – eventually brought Collins into contact with the American abstract painter Mark Tobey, who in turn introduced him to Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the founders of the progressive arts school Dartington Hall (see lot 132). Here, together with his beloved wife Elisabeth, Collins spent some of the most productive years of his life, and it is from 1943, their final year at Dartington, that two of the present works date, executed in the same year as the Tate’s The Sleeping Fool. The 1940s are today recognised as his most important and successful creative decade, marking both international success and the emergence of his seminal ‘Holy Fools’ series, marked by the publication of his essay The Vision of the Fool. The decade also marked the emergence of a new style, in which many of the symbols and archetypes that had so inspired him coalesce into a unique visual language. Yet these are not pictures to be read and understood, but rather to provide as many questions as one is willing to give them viewings.

Cecil Collins’ popularity has waxed and waned over the course of the past century. Having achieved early critical and commercial success in the years before and after the War, he became side-lined by the new attitudes the 1960s and ‘70s, before undergoing a serious reappraisal with his major retrospective at the Tate in 1989. Yet throughout this period of flux in his reputation (an occurrence not uncommon for many an artist working in Britain over the past century) one thing remained constant, namely the striking originality of his artistic voice. Like Stanley Spencer and Edward Burra he couldn’t be pigeon-holed; and like them his work seems to have found his way into the nation’s hearts precisely because of this inability to fit. He is, without doubt, one of the most unique and engaging voices in 20th Century British art.