Ithell Colquhoun

Ithell Colquhoun was a British Surrealist painter and author. She was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India. From the 1930s to her death, her work was exhibited widely in Britain and Germany. Her parents were Henry Colquhoun, an assistant to the ambassador in Manipur, and his wife Georgia. Colquhoun was educated in Rodwell, near Weymouth, Dorset before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College. There she studied topics such as the cabbala and the occult. Colquhoun studied for a period at the Slade School of Art in London, under Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe, before travelling to France in 1931. It was in Paris that she discovered surrealism and was especially influenced by the works of Salvador Dalí. Another influence on Colquhoun was the psychomorphological works of Roberto Matta and Onslow Ford. Her first one-woman exhibition of works was at Cheltenham Art Gallery in 1936. Soon after, she joined the political group, Artists' International Association. By 1939, Colquhoun had joined the English Surrealist Group and in June she and Rowland Penrose showed their works in a joint exhibition at Mayor Gallery. There they created a scandal by asking a vagrant to sit in the window. In 1940, E. L. T. Mesens, head of the English Surrealist Group, expelled her from the group for carrying on with occult research. She became a member of the Druidic Order and the Order of the Stella Matutina, both occult groups. After the 1950s, she was regarded as a 'fantamagiste', an unorthodox surrealist who focus on the occult. Colquhoun lived with Antonio Romanov del Renzio in London during World War II, marrying him in July 1943 and divorcing him a few years later. From 1946, Colquhoun kept a studio near Penzance, Cornwall, while living in London. She finally moved to Cornwall in 1957, where she lived until her death on 11 April 1988.