The Emissaries, 1961
Marion Adnams (1898-1995)
Marion Adnams's The Emissaries (1961) is an intriguing example of her mature surrealist period, painted shortly after her retirement from teaching when her artistic imagination was becoming increasingly liberated and personal.
Her paintings often place ordinary objects—stones, shells, masks, architectural fragments, flowers, or enigmatic forms—into dreamlike landscapes where they acquire symbolic or psychological significance. The title The Emissaries is especially evocative in this regard. In surrealist terms, an "emissary" suggests a messenger from another realm—dreams, memory, the unconscious, or myth. The rock-forms in the painting can therefore be read less as inert geological objects and more as sentient presences or symbolic intermediaries. Adnams frequently transformed natural forms in this way, positioning them as characters or actors within a mysterious narrative. This ambiguity is central to her art.
In her later work, Adnams’s imagery becomes increasingly poetic and introspective, moving further away from observable reality. Freed from the constraints of teaching, she was able to develop a more sustained and private exploration of her practice. The Emissaries thus belongs to a period in which her paintings often feel more symbolic and meditative rather than the sharper surrealist juxtapositions of the 1940s.
Marion Adnams (1898-1995)
Marion Adnams (1898–1995) initially trained as a modern languages teacher. However, after woodcuts she made while travelling in Europe during the 1920s received significant praise when she exhibited them at Derby Art Gallery and with the Derby Women’s Club, she retrained at Derby School of Art, qualifying as an art teacher in 1938 and becoming Head of Art at Derby Training College in 1946 . From the late 1930s onwards, Adnams forged a reputation as a painter of deeply distinctive and dream-like visions inspired by Surrealism and exhibited in local galleries and in London, including at the British Art Centre, alongside Eileen Agar and at the Modern Art Gallery, alongside Jack Bilbo and Max Ernst. Although she never formally joined any Surrealist societies, she was a significant contributor to the movement, particularly regarding the female/male dichotomies within the group which she explored extensively in her work.
