EMPEDOCLES, 1943
Oil on canvas. 22 x 15in. (56 x 38.1cm.)
Signed and dated lower right Colquhoun /43. Inscribed and dated on the stretcher Ithell Colquhoun Empedocles 1943.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, 24th April 1985, lot 508.
Christies, London 14th May 1993. Lot 135. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
Simon Parkin Gallery.
Christies, London, 6th March 1998. Lot 111. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Exhibited
London, United Artists’ Exhibition, 1943, No. 600.
Bradford, Cartwright Memorial Hall, 1946 No. 555, (or 746).
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1949, No, 218.
Penzance, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1961, No. 23.
London, Leva Gallery, 1974, No. 16; dimensions given as 23 x 17in.
A nine-lobed, transparent, flower, like a simplified lotus, is surrounded by a ring that supports and contains the petals. A multi-faceted crystal sits inside the calyx, atop a narrow water-jet or, perhaps, a feathery pistil.
Empedocles was a Greek philosopher. His philosophical system was based upon the four elements (Fire; Earth; Air; Water). A natural force, Strife, tended to disunite the elements, whilst the other, Love, strove to unite them. At different times in history strife has been in the ascendant, at other times it has been love. This idea, in the hands of Sigmund Freud, became the Death Instinct and Eros, the life instinct. Empedocles also developed a basic scheme of ‘primary’ colours that corresponded to the elements: (black; white; red and ochron (colour uncertain). He is said to have cast himself into the crater of Mount Etna, so that people would suppose he had returned to the Gods. Etna, however, threw out his sandal, thus destroying the illusion.
Volcanoes were a constant theme in Colquhoun’s work. The volcano in her novel Goose of Hermogenes is named ‘the bed of Empedocles’.
See The Bed of Empedocles, (c.1957).