Spotted Lilies, 1936
Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988)
Ithell Colquhoun's Spotted Lilies (1936) forms part of the remarkable series of enlarged flower paintings she produced during the mid-1930s, a period that marked her transition from academic naturalism towards Surrealism. Exhibited in her 1936 London exhibition Exotic Plant Decorations, the painting belongs to a body of work that includes Gloxinia, Pitcher-plant, Crane Flowers, and Clematis, all of which demonstrate her growing fascination with the symbolic and psychological potential of botanical and natural forms.
Like the other flower paintings from this period, Spotted Lilies is far more than a botanical study. Colquhoun magnifies the flower so that it dominates the picture plane, transforming petals, stamens, and organic structures into forms that appear at once sensual, bodily, and dreamlike. While her close observation of nature remains evident, the painting moves beyond scientific description towards a more ambiguous visual language in which natural forms become charged with erotic, psychological and symbolic associations. Art historians have identified these enlarged botanical works as among Colquhoun's earliest sustained engagement with surrealist ideas.
Colquhoun's interest in plants was lifelong, rooted in careful biological observation, yet she increasingly viewed flowers and vegetation as manifestations of deeper creative and sexual energies. Her botanical imagery from the mid-1930s explores the fluid boundaries between nature and body, masculine and feminine, exterior form and inner life. In this respect, Spotted Lilies anticipates the more overtly erotic and symbolic imagery of works such as Pitcher-plant and Scylla, while retaining a striking balance between naturalistic precision and surrealist transformation.
Lilies themselves carry rich symbolic associations—purity, sexuality, fertility, death, and rebirth—and Colquhoun's enlargement of the flower encourages viewers to read the plant as something simultaneously botanical and bodily. This tension would become increasingly explicit in her paintings of 1936–38. Created shortly after her encounters with Surrealism in Paris, Spotted Lilies reveals an artist beginning to harness the imaginative and symbolic possibilities of the natural world. Today, it stands as a significant example of the flower paintings that laid the foundations for her mature practice, in which themes of sexuality, transformation, mysticism, and the unconscious would become central concerns.
Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988)
Ithell Colquhoun studied at Cheltenham Art School (1925 - 7) and the Slade School of Fine Art (1927 - 31), winning joint first prize in the 1929 Summer Composition Competition. After discovering Surrealism in Paris in 1932, she held her first solo exhibition at Cheltenham Art Gallery in 1936 and in 1939 joined the British Surrealist Group, showing alongside Roland Penrose at the Mayor Gallery that June. She was particularly interested in automatic painting and how it could unlock not just the unconscious mind but also the mystical. Despite her expulsion from the British Surrealist Group in 1940 due to her increasing preoccupation with the occult, Colquhoun remained active in Surrealist circles; she was married to Toni del Renzio from 1943 - 48. She wrote and illustrated numerous books, including The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), and exhibited in London at the Leicester Galleries and with the London Group, as well as in Regional galleries and abroad. She took part in several Surrealist retrospectives in the 1970s, including a solo show at the Newlyn Gallery in 1976, and the terms of her will bequeathed her studio (over 3000 works) to the National Trust, which in 2019 was transferred to Tate.
