Clematis, 1935

Ithell Colquhoun's Clematis (1935) belongs to a pivotal phase in her career, just before she formally joined the British Surrealist movement. During the mid-1930s, she produced a remarkable series of highly magnified flower paintings that, at first glance, appear to be botanical studies but are in fact imbued with psychological, symbolic, and often erotic resonances. These works mark her transition from academic training towards the distinctive surrealist visual language for which she later became renowned.

Between 1934 and 1936, Colquhoun painted flowers including Gloxinia, Pitcher-plant, Crane Flowers, Spotted Lilies, and Clematis, the latter three of which are also held in the RAW collection. Far from being straightforward botanical illustrations, these paintings combine close observation of natural forms with abstraction, symbolism, and a growing fascination with the exotic and the occult. By enlarging her floral subjects to fill the picture plane, Colquhoun transformed petals, stamens, and leaves into ambiguous forms that negate between the botanical and the bodily, evoking associations that are at once sensual, psychological, and dreamlike.

Art historians have identified these flower paintings as among Colquhoun's earliest engagements with surrealist ideas, informed in part by her exposure to European modernism during her time in Paris in her late twenties. They reveal an artist experimenting with themes of transformation, sexuality, and the unconscious before the emergence of the more overtly dreamlike and esoteric imagery that would characterise her later work. Today, this series is widely regarded as a crucial stage in Colquhoun's artistic development, laying the foundations for the mature practice that has earned her renewed critical and public recognition in recent years.