Ithell Colquhoun

Ithell Colquhoun was a British painter, poet, author and occultist whose artwork was stylistically affiliated with Surrealism. In the early 1930s she met André Breton (1896–1966, French writer and poet, known as a principal theorist and co-founder of surrealism whose writings include the first Manifeste du surréalisme/Surrealist Manifesto of 1924) in Paris and later started working with Surrealist automatism techniques in her writing and painting. In the late 1930s, Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with various occult groups. Despite her break with the movement, Colquhoun was a lifelong adherent to Surrealism and its automatic techniques.

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.

Though Colquhoun was a relatively unknown artist by her death in 1988 compared to other women surrealists such as Eileen Agar (1899–1991, Argentine-British painter and photographer) and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012, American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet), more recently there has been renewed interest in her work from feminist and esoteric viewpoints. In 2012, Dr Amy Hale, PhD (ethnographer, folklorist, writer, curator and critic, who has written widely on Colquhoun and was an advisor for the Colquhoun retrospective at Tate St. Ives and Tate Britain in 2025), noted that Colquhoun ‘is becoming recognised as one of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century’.

Born to British parents in Shillong, British India, Colquhoun was educated in Rodwell, Dorset, before attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Colquhoun then spent 1925 at Cheltenham School of Art, and from October 1927, she studied at the Slade School of Art in London. In 1929, Colquhoun received the Slade’s Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes (1929, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm, UCL Art Museum, University College London), which was later exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1931.

After leaving the Slade in 1931, Colquhoun spent several years travelling, establishing a studio in Paris and attending the Académie Colarossi. During the 1930s she also spent time in Greece, Corsica, and Tenerife. While in Greece, Colquhoun met and became infatuated with a woman, Andromache ‘Kyria’ Kazou, who was the subject of several drawings and paintings and an unpublished manuscript, Lesbian Shore. Kazou appears to have visited Colquhoun in Paris, and Colquhoun later invited her to move to London so they could live together, though Kazou never did so.

In the early 1930s, Colquhoun submitted works to exhibitions at the New English Art Club and the Royal Academy. She exhibited three paintings in Paris in 1933 and one work at the Royal Society of Scotland in 1934. In 1936, she had her first solo exhibition at the Cheltenham Art Gallery, where she showed 91 works. A solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London followed in the same year.

Colquhoun began to visit Cornwall during the Second World War. From 1947, she rented a studio near Penzance and divided her time between there and London; in 1959, she finally settled in the village of Paul and remained in Cornwall for the rest of her life. After this, Colquhoun increasingly focused on publishing her writing, and from the 1960s her output of visual art substantially declined in favour of her writing and her occult activities. Colquhoun continued making art, however, until around 1983.

She spent her final years in a nursing home in Lamorna, Cornwall, where she passed away 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, London. Tate’s 2019 acquisition of Colquhoun’s impressive 5,000-piece archive, previously in the possession of the National Trust, became a pivotal step in recognising the artist’s contributions to Surrealism.

In 2020, Colquhoun’s work featured in the British Surrealism exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. In 2021, it was featured in the Phantoms of Surrealism show at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Unsettling Landscapes exhibition at St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery, Lymington, United Kingdom, 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.

Colquhoun’s work is represented in the following selected collections: Tate Britain, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; British Museum, London; Museum of London, London; University of London, College Art Collections, London; Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, United Kingdom; Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, United Kingdom; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, United Kingdom; Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, United Kingdom; Hove Museum and Art Gallery, Hove, United Kingdom; Wilson Art Gallery, Cheltenham, United Kingdom; Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, United Kingdom; Penlee Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom; Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton, United Kingdom; National Football Museum, Manchester, United Kingdom; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.

Colquhoun’s work has been on view in the following selected solo exhibitions Municipal Art Gallery, Cheltenham, United Kingdom, Exhibition of Decorations, Paintings and Drawings (1936); Fine Art Society, London,Exotic Plant Decorations (1936); Heal’s Mansard Gallery, London, Exotic Plant Decorations (ca. 1937); Whiteley’s, London (1938); The Everyman Theatre Foyer, London (1938); Mayor Gallery, London (1939); Mayor Gallery, London, Exhibition of Paintings by Ithell Colquhoun (1947); Mayor Gallery, London, Exhibition of Drawings by Ithell Colquhoun (1947); Heffer Gallery, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun. Paintings and Drawings 1942-1953 (1953); Gallery 1, London, Ithell Colquhoun: Exhibition of Paintings in Gouaches and Coloured Inks (1957); Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Retrospective Exhibition of Oil Paintings (1961); Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Constructions and Collages (1967); Kunstamt Wilmersdorf, Berlin, Ithell Colquhoun: Paintings (1969);Gallerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Hamburg, Germany, Ithell Colquhoun: Constructions and Collages (1969); Bristol Arts Centre, Bristol, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Paintings, Constructions, Collages (1970); Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Montages, Gouaches, Collages (1971); Exeter Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Paintings, Collages and Drawings (1972); Orion Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Flower and Plant Paintings (1973); Leva Gallery, London, Ithell Colquhoun: An Exhibition of Surrealist Paintings and Drawings from 1930-1950 (1974); Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism, Paintings, Drawings, Collages 1936-76 (1976); Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, The Taro as Colour (1977); The Parkin Gallery, London, Ithell Colquhoun: Paintings and Drawings 1930-40 (1977); The Framers Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Early Watercolours and Gouaches (1980); The Plough Gallery, Torrington, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Early Watercolours and Gouaches (1980); The Framers Gallery, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Flowers – Early and Late (1981); Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Image and Imagination (2016); Viktor Wynd Gallery, London, Ithell Colquhoun: Surrealism, Occultism and Sexuality (2019-2020); and Tate St Ives, St Ives, United Kingdom, Ithell Colquhoun: Between Two Worlds (2025).