Ithell Colquhoun

Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was born in Shillong, British India, the daughter of Henry Archibald Colebrooke Colquhoun and Georgia Frances Ithell Manley. She was educated in Rodwell, near Weymouth, Dorset, before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College. She became interested in occultism at the age of 17 after reading about Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema. Colquhoun studied from 1925 at Cheltenham School of Art for a year. From October 1927 she studied at the Slade School of Art in London, where she was taught by Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe. While at the Slade, she joined G.R.S. Mead's Quest Society, and in 1930 published her first article, "The Prose of Alchemy", in the society's journal. In 1929, Colquhoun received the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, and in 1931 it was exhibited in the Royal Academy. After leaving the Slade in 1931, Colquhoun spent several years travelling. She established a studio in Paris, and attended the Académie Colarossi in 1931 During the 1930s she also spent time in Greece, Corsica, and Tenerife. Colquhoun continued making art until around 1983. She spent her final years in a nursing home in Lamorna, where she died in 1988. Colquhoun left her literary works to the writer Derek Stanford, her occult work to the Tate, and the remainder of her art to the National Trust. The copyright for the works she sold (or gifted) during her lifetime was left to The Samaritans, the Noise Abatement Society, and the Sister Perpetua Wing of St Anthony's Hospital, North Cheam. In 2019, the Tate acquired the National Trust's holdings of Colquhoun's works. ==Art==

Though only formally involved with the Surrealist movement in England for a few years, Colquhoun first gained her reputation as a surrealist, and identified as a surrealist for the rest of her life. She used many automatic techniques, and used a wide range of materials and methods, such as decalcomania, fumage, frottage and collage. She developed new techniques such as superautomatism, stillomancy, parsemage, and entopic graphomania, writing about them in her article "The Mantic Stain". In 1939, she created the work Tepid Waters (Rivières Tièdes) which was displayed at her solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery the same year. The painting, based on a church in Corsica, may allude to the Spanish Civil War. == Writing ==

Along with her visual art, Colquhoun was a prolific writer, producing works including poetry, essays, novels, and travel guides. From the 1950s, Colquhoun's output as a visual artist decreased, and she increasingly focused on her poetry and essay writing. Colquhoun published her first article, "The Prose of Alchemy", in 1930. In 1939, she published several pieces of short fiction in the London Bulletin, along with an essay, "What Do I Need to Paint a Picture?". In the 1940s she continued to publish short works in anthologies such as New Road: New Directions in Art and Writing and The Fortune Anthology, and organised surrealist poetry readings with del Renzio. During this period, her writing was influenced by the New Apocalypse literary movement, as well as the Mass Observation project. She wrote articles on automatism: "The Mantic Stain" – which she claimed was the first English-language essay on surrealist automatism – in 1949, "Children of the Mantic Stain" in 1951, and "Notes on Automatism" in 1980. Later in life she contributed articles to surrealist revival journals. Colquhoun wrote three travel books: The Crying of the Wind and Living Stones, about Ireland and Cornwall respectively, were published in the 1950s; a third book on Egypt, begun in the 1960s, was never published. In 1975 she published The Sword of Wisdom, a biography of the British occultist Samuel MacGregor Mathers. She published a novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, which was largely written by automatic processes. The novel tells the story of a girl lured to an island by her uncle to help him in his search for the Philosopher's Stone. Colquhoun wrote two more surrealist gothic novels, I Saw Water and Destination Limbo, neither of which was published in her lifetime; I Saw Water was published in 2014 and Destination Limbo in 2021. She also published two volumes of poetry during her lifetime. Grimoire of the Entangled Thicket was a short poetry book inspired by the Tree of Life in 1973, and Osmazone, published in 1983, was an anthology of prose poems, many from much earlier in her life. ==Reception and legacy==

Colquhoun gained an early reputation within the British Surrealist movement, though in later years she became better known as an occultist. Although her work has largely been discussed in terms of its connection to Surrealism, Colquhoun sometimes stated her independence from the movement. In 1939, the same year she joined the English Surrealist group, she described herself as an 'independent artist' in a review for the London Bulletin. Though Colquhoun was a relatively unknown artist by her death in 1988 compared to other women surrealists such as Eileen Agar and Dorothea Tanning, more recently there has been renewed interest in her work from feminist and esoteric viewpoints. In 2012, the scholar Amy Hale noted that Colquhoun "is becoming recognized as one of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century". Hale argued that through Colquhoun's work "we can see an interplay of themes and movements which characterizes the trajectory of certain British subcultures ranging from Surrealism to the Earth Mysteries movement and also gives us a rare insight into the thoughts and processes of a working magician". In 2020, Colquhoun's work featured in the British Surrealism exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. In 2021, it was featured in the Phantoms of Surrealism show at Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Unsettling Landscapes exhibition at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, and was the focus of an exhibition at Unit London, Song of Songs. In 2025, Tate St Ives hosted the exhibition Ithell Colquhoun: Between Two Worlds, the largest exhibition of Colquhoun's work to date, with more than 170 of her artworks and writings on display. ==Bibliography==