30 Facts About Ithell Colquhoun

Ithell Colquhoun was a British painter, occultist, poet and author.

Ithell Colquhoun was born in Shillong in British India, but brought up in the United Kingdom.

Ithell Colquhoun spent the latter part of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1988.

Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was born in Shillong, British India, the daughter of Henry Archibald Colebrooke Colquhoun and Georgia Frances Ithell Manley.

Ithell Colquhoun was educated in Rodwell, near Weymouth, Dorset, before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College.

Ithell Colquhoun became interested in occultism at the age of 17 after reading about Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema.

Ithell Colquhoun studied from 1925 at Cheltenham School of Art for a year.

In 1929, Ithell Colquhoun received the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, and in 1931 it was exhibited in the Royal Academy.

Ithell Colquhoun exhibited three paintings in Paris in 1933, and one work at the Royal Society of Scotland in 1934.

Ithell Colquhoun published work in the London Bulletin in 1938 and 1939, visited Andre Breton in Paris in 1939, and joined the British Surrealist Group in the same year.

Mesens' demands that the surrealists should not be members of any other groups, which Ithell Colquhoun felt would interfere with her studies of occultism.

From 1945, Ithell Colquhoun lived and worked in Parkhill Road, Hampstead.

Ithell Colquhoun began to visit Cornwall during the Second World War.

Ithell Colquhoun remained in Cornwall for the rest of her life.

Ithell Colquhoun had solo exhibitions in 1947 at the Mayor Gallery, in 1972 at Exeter Museum and Art Gallery, and in 1976 at the Newlyn Orion Gallery.

Ithell Colquhoun spent her final years in a nursing home in Lamorna, where she died in 1988.

Ithell 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.

Ithell Colquhoun used many automatic techniques, which were described in Andre Breton's first surrealist manifesto as a defining feature of surrealism, and invented several herself.

Ithell Colquhoun began to experiment with automatic techniques in 1939, and used a wide range of materials and methods, such as decalcomania, fumage, frottage and collage.

Ithell Colquhoun developed new techniques such as superautomatism, stillomancy, parsemage, and entopic graphomania, writing about them in her article "The Mantic Stain".

Ithell Colquhoun had an early interest in biology, and studies of plants and flowers were a recurring theme in her art throughout her life.

Ithell Colquhoun was deeply interested in androgyny, particularly in the early 1940s, and produced several works on the theme.

Ithell Colquhoun published her first article, "The Prose of Alchemy", in 1930.

Ithell Colquhoun wrote three travel books: The Crying of the Wind and Living Stones, about Ireland and Cornwall respectively, were published in the 1950s; a third book on Egypt, begun in the 1960s, was never published.

Ithell Colquhoun published a novel, The Goose of Hermogenes, which was largely written by automatic processes.

Ithell Colquhoun wrote two more surrealist gothic novels, I Saw Water and Destination Limbo, neither of which was published in her lifetime; I Saw Water was published in 2014 and Destination Limbo in 2021.

Ithell Colquhoun published two volumes of poetry during her lifetime.

Ithell Colquhoun gained an early reputation within the British Surrealist movement, though in later years she became better known as an occultist.

In 2012, the scholar Amy Hale noted that Ithell Colquhoun "is becoming recognized as one of the most interesting and prolific esoteric thinkers and artists of the twentieth century".

In 2020, Ithell Colquhoun's work featured in the British Surrealism exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.