Cecil Collins

There are two letters from Cecil Collins to Ruth Borchard, dated 21st August 1964 and 14th September 1964, sent from Cambridge. In the first, 'I am looking among my things for the self portrait that you are interested in. There are two self portraits in private collections. And I think that I have some more in my portfolio in my studio in London. So I will let you know when I find them there. Yes, 20gns would be alright, but I am afraid it would have to be unframed at that price, would that be alright for you? Many thanks for writing to me. I am very interested to hear of your collection of self portraits. It must be unique!'

In the second letter, he writes: 'This is just a hasty note to say, please find enclosed here a drawing by me. Self Portrait (1949, pen, brush and ink), that you asked me for.' It is worth noting how expressive Collins's mostly cursive handwriting appears: his upward-inclining signature, with its steep flourishing underlining, appears like some benign, dynamic force out of nature.

As Collins implied in his first letter to Ruth, his self-portraits are few and far between. In the catalogue for 'Cecil Collins: A Retrospective Exhibition' at the Tate Gallery in 1989, a Self-Portrait (1932) in oils is illustrated in black-and-white – a quite realistic study of a thin, wistful-looking young man with a full beard. In the catalogue essay, Judith Collins notes: 'Besides another self-portrait in oils, painted contemporaneously in a looser style and in brighter colours [Cecil Collins (1932; Collection: National Portrait Gallery, London) – which has, in its purplish and brown hues and elongated head, something of the phantasmagorical pigmentation and sorrowful expressiveness of an El Greco portrait], there are only two other self-portraits by the artist and both of these are works on paper. One is a roneo print and the other was drawn in ink at the request of the Art News and Review in 1949.' There was another self-portrait work on paper – that purchased by Ruth. There exist also a 1948 Portrait of the Artist (Collection: Southampton City Art Gallery), in which his head is seen in profile turning to the right, his features, beard and hair composed of a calligraphy of black lines, squiggles and strokes over a wash of burnished ochre, against a backdrop of surging blues, and also a 1976 pencil drawing of The Artist Painting. In the Tate Collection, there is Collins's great self-portrait – actually consisting of one half of a magisterial, infinitely tender portrayal of his marriage. In the Artist and his Wife (1939), Cecil portrays himself as a lean, wan-faced, scarlet-lipped, green-suited sage, and Elisabeth Collins as his serene and beatific life partner and muse.

Cecil's 1949 Self-Portrait now in the Borchard Collection evokes the gaunt, touchingly sweet and sorrowful look of the frail, humorous, assured man evident in photographs from his student days onwards. The artist was forty-one years old at the time, and still had a head of thick dark hair and a full beard. The emphatically high forehead, large, painfully sensitive eyes and sunken, almost cadaverous-looking cheeks give the impression of a keen, ascetic and unworldly intelligence. This is a face with strong contours and powerful shadows cast by the cheekbone and nose: conjuring up the presence of a man with a wiry, well-defined presence (despite his apparent frailty of constitution) and outlook. Yet his hair, beard and features generally are described by whirling lines, eddying currents, staccato flourishes: a surreal atmospheric calligraphy flitting across the face of a landscape. One of Blake's famous 'Proverbs of Hell' seems relevant here: 'The eyes of fire, the nostrils of air, the mouth of water, the beard of earth.'

Collins seems to be reminding us that landscape, the four elements of fire, air, water and earth, inhabit us as much as vice versa; in other words that we are, in the most profound and intimate sense, nature. What the artist said to me in 1985 (specifically referring to a small panel Angel (1972), quoted in a long essay on his art and mystical philosophy, 'The Poet's Vision', The Artist magazine) is apposite here: 'People think I am a cerebral person. I am a man of pure feeling. Here is elusive feeling objectified in technique. This is the classical idea.'

The 1949 self-portrait by Collins, also ink and wash on paper (as referred to above by Judith Collins), was illustrated as part of the feature 'Portrait of the Artist' in Art News & Review on December 3rd 1949, with text by Bryan Robertson. Collins faces to the right. Above his moustache and beard – quite realistically drawn yet also resembling, in its details, multiple miniature tongues of flame – his complexion appears smooth and luminous (the paper has correspondingly been left blank in this area). Collins's look is one of blithe self-assurance; he appears perhaps less vulnerable here than in the work Ruth bought.

For Collins, the portrayal of the human face always carried resonances of metaphysical and mysticaly earning as he expressed in a poem:

How often, have we, in secret, wept over you,

O Face of Paradise.

Cecil Collins, 

(poem XVIII, from In the Solitude of this Land: poems 1940-81).

Cecil Collins was born in Plymouth in 1908. From the outset, he seems to have had an ability to readily enter a metaphysical state of being. As a young child – and for the rest of his life – he regarded clouds as gateways to an eternal dimension, and he described how 'I was fascinated as a child watching the sunflowers go round.' He said that as a young boy, he learned 'the language of stones and grass and trees and clouds [...] It was moments like these, I think, that came together and formed a kind of unconscious certainty that what we normally see is a very contracted and superficial view.' From 1924-27, he attended Plymouth School of Art, and won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art from 1927-31. In 1931 he married Elisabeth Ramsden, a fellow Royal College student and gifted painter. In the 1985 Artist article, I wrote: '[The painting] The Artist's House (1932; Collection: Museums Sheffield) shows a higgledy-piggledy, naively-painted house, with he and Elisabeth each framed by windows. Two angels float above in a tryst, dwarfing lovers and house. As always with Collins, perspective is entirely devoted to and in tune with emotion, as with the tall, very curvy tree here, its rhythms expressive of joie de vivre.

'The serene features of Elisabeth recur throughout his oeuvre. Collins explains that 'the figure of the woman is an ancient archetype of the soul, of the anima' [...] The Artist's Wife Seated in a Tree (1976) [...] is a masterpiece [...] The tall lady, witha bird on her knee, appears comfortable, decorous even, sitting near the clouds. The tree in which she sits (or floats) is shorter than she is. Its base extends into what I interpret to be the foot of a mountain. In the foreground is a long winding stream, rather like an uncoiled blue snake [...] The [complex ambiguity] of the symbolic language Collins uses [...] is a constant throughout his work. I would say that the tree is the flowering of a holy mountain, and the artist's wife is both the blossoming of the tree and the song of the bird. Collins's art operates on this level of interior dream, in which all appearances are hieroglyphs for deeper [...[ fully awakened realities.'

It was in 1931-32 that Cecil and Elisabeth rented the beautiful, isolated, and basic Buckinghamshire cottage with no electricity, where he absorbed himself in reading mystical poetry and literature. It was alsoduring this abundantly self-nurturing period that he met the painter and poet David Jones and the sculptor Eric Gill, inspiring early influences on his vision of the artist as a poetic seer.

A retrospective exhibition – 'Elisabeth Collins: Works from the studio' at England & Co., London in late 2001 - included a lively, c.1930s ink drawing of Cecil by Elisabeth, and also her own tenderly affective and childlike pastel portrait of their marriage – Elisabeth seen seated and curiously diminutive in a long blue dress, Cecil standing over her in a long brown, monk-like gown, a sweetly enigmatic look on his face; as Jane England noted in the catalogue essay: 'Her marriage to a fellow artist, Cecil Collins, entailed her loving gift to him of much of her time and energy for the fifty-eight years they were together.' Elisabeth Collins died in 2000.

Cecil's paintings of the mid-1930s, like The Cells of Night (1934; Collection: Tate) and Magical Images in the Process of Time (1936), show beatific, seemingly sexless human figures and faces within cosmic landscapes of radiant biomorphic and starry forms, and symbols of mystical transfiguration like chrysalises and butterflies. He exhibited in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, but, though he felt a certain kinship with artists like Ernst and Klee, was inclined to embark on a solitary, independent quest rather than as part of a cosmopolitan art movement. As Peter Fuller noted, in anarticle in Modern Painters magazine (Vol. 2, no. 2, 1989), 'Collins’s paintings do not contain representations of objects seen in the visible world: indeed, he often reverses those rules of drawing and perspective through which artists attempt to transcribe appearances. And yet, despite his rejection of surrealism, or, come to that, of conventional religious belief, he insists that there is no meaning in life or art 'excepting that which springs from the immortal surreality of that Eternal Person'.'

When the author interviewed Collins in 1985 at his and Elisabeth's attic home and studio on the top floor of an elegant 1830s house in Paultons Square, Chelsea, London – with its tiny kitchen on a landing, and low-ceiling sitting room walls painted with beatific images by the artist (the rest of the house was occupied by the poetand Blakean scholar Kathleen Raine), he spoke of how lonely and isolated his creative life had felt to him. He acknowledged he had always had some intelligently appreciative admirers but felt that general recognition and real understanding had eluded him. Perhaps he had been, for most of his life, an unappreciated seer far ahead of his time. His illustrated text, 'The Vision of the Fool', written in 1944 in the dark days of war (and published first in 1947) when he and Elisabeth were living and teaching at Dartington Hall in Devon – a centre for enlightened thought and a place where avant-garde painters like the American abstract painter Mark Tobey and members ofthe Dutch Joos Ballet troupe then congregated – was a soaringly poetic plea for a playful relaxation of the brutalist, utilitarian work ethic that he felt dominated and stifled modern society. The tenor of 'The Vision of the Fool' would strike more general chords of imaginative response in the countercultural 1960s, and has parallels with the writings and mystical message of the American Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and the American Zen Buddhist writer and sage Alan Watts. By the time 'The Vision of the Fool' was re-published in 1981 a wider, enlightened public was more willing to listen to its message of how a pristine, cosmic (yet, notionally, non-religious) sensibility (onthe part of the artist and seer) was essential in positively transforming moribund social values. At the text's heart is the following: 'The Fool represents that innate, inviolate, primordial innocence which [...] perceives directly orclearly [...] It seems to me that that is what life is about – the recovery of direct perception.'

Here is a passage the author wrote about Collins's 'Fools' following our discussion in 1985 (The Artist, January 1986):

[....] the fool signifies (for him) all that is disdained by the world: purposeless gaiety, compassion and silly divine irresponsibility [...]. In Fool with a Flower (1944; Collection: Tate), a crowned fool bends to touch, perhaps to pluck, a flower. The lines are simple and spare, and the space between the fool's sensitive hand and the object of his affectionate interest, is a musically-charged and vibrant vacancy. This 'note' evokes certain qualities especially evident in Collins's life and work – tenderness towards people and nature, sensitivity to the utmost refinements of atmosphere [...] infinitely painstaking attention to the [...] artist's media and materials.

In Standing Fool with a Bird (1979), the figure has his cornet-covered head just barely at a tilt and his eyes closed, in deep thought or momentary ecstasy. The bird perched on his left hand regards him with a quizzical eye. The tears we may feel emerging are, ambiguously, those of quiet laughter and [...] sadness. Collins speaks of the music of Mozart and Chopin being double-edged in their [...] paradisial merriment and what he calls 'subtle melancholy'. This serves only to make Paradise, he believes, more beautiful and more human. 'I haven't finished with my Fools yet. After all, their innocence and sorrow are inexhaustible.'

From 1945-47, Collins lived in Halifax, Yorkshire, near his wife's family, and then from 1948-70 in Cambridge. In 1951, he began part-time teaching at the Central School in London, which he continued until the late 1980s; he was respected by many as an art teacher who endeavoured to awaken his pupils' innermost consciousness, often with the aid of music, dance, or, simply, mindful silence. (He also earned then the enmity of those he called 'cultural bureaucrats with vested interests in the system, the avant-garde of the Sixties, the failedartists'). In 1971, he moved to London; as he explained to me in 1985, 'My life has not followed the usual order. As a young man, I lived a retired country life, absorbed in my work. Now I lead a busy life in the city.' In 1978, the Arts Council commissioned a film on Collins, The Eye of the Heart. In 1988, he held an exhibition of 'Recent Paintings' at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London. He died in 1989, not long after he had managed to see, with great pleasure, his retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

The following works count among his finest achievements. The small painting The Pilgrim Fool (1943), which shows a crowned, spangle-pantalooned Fool tenderly leading a small, long-haired girl by the hand away from a burning city in the background, is one which places his visionary work fully in the context of his own tragic times. Collins explained that in this image the child is the Fool's 'own soul, his anima, the most valuable of his possessions which he is saving from the destruction and violence in the distance’.

Dark, minatory, matrix-patterned paintings of the late 1950s – some of which were included by Bryan Robertson in the retrospective he afforded Collins at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1959 – can be seen in retrospect to relate to contemporary art developments, both of Abstract Expressionism (in the United States) and abstraction lyrique (in Europe).

His 1973 painted altarpiece, The Icon of Divine Light in Chichester Cathedral – representing a gigantic yet infinitely gentle, androgynous, 'solarised' human face with mesmeric eyes, a mane of flames, and an outer halo of sharp piercing rays surrounded by sharp thorns of gold irradiating celestial regions – and, at All Saints Church, Basingstoke, his similarly radiant-yellow 1985 windows depicting two angels holding circles containing an eye within a heart (symbolising the inner eye of mystical vision) – and his great west 1988 window there entitled The Mystery of the Holy Spirit, portraying a transfixing solar face surrounded by whirling circles of angels with wings like tongues of flames: all these works speak of the kind of universal vision that he felt Christianity (which he thought had long lost its way) needed to be enriched by, and so reconciled with. (All these windows were made to his design by Patrick Reyntiens.) He said to me that he was not interested in any consciously religious interpretations. 'Theology is a quest for security on the part of the male.' But he did not deny that his works were mystical. 'The mystical is the acknowledgement of the mystery, that it is a mystery.'

These were the author's impressions on meeting Collins in 1985: 'At seventy-seven years of age, Cecil Collins is, simultaneously, a strong and a frail figure. He is now producing beautifully clarified and refined paintings of angelic benedictions accompanied by the most tender human gestures. He is preparing an exhibition for the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, teaching part-time at London's Central School of Art, still writing, and giving his impassioned lectures. He is, as always, interested in discovering new painters whose work is authentic and open. The sweetness and understanding of his eyes, his sudden enthusiasms, his sensitive hands gesturing assent or dissent or many subtle shades of response, are those of the young man.'