THE HEART OF CORN, c.1941
Watercolour. 9¾ x 6¾in. (25 x 17.5cm.) (ss)
Inscribed on the reverse of the frame with the artist’s name, the date, c. 1941, and the Fairfax Road address.
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
Exhibited
London, the Leicester Galleries, 1941, No 29 (1st ed. of catalogue).
Harrogate, Harrogate Art Gallery, 1941, No 18.
Allegories concerning corn and seed corn are common. Seed appears to be lifeless but contains the germ of life. Death precedes regeneration and sacrifice brings forth fruit.
Colquhoun may have been familiar with the Mayan female fetish objects known as the Heart of Corn, but she was certainly familiar, through Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, with the corn goddess a symbol of sacrifice and regeneration. Fraser describes some Mesoamerican rituals associated with the Spirit of the Corn, but does not use the actual phrase ‘Heart of Corn’. He also describes rituals involving Osiris in his aspect as corn god and his sister/wife Isis, the corn goddess, who was sometimes described as the ‘mother or the ears of corn and who gave birth to the fruits of the earth’.
Mortification of the alchemists’ material is necessary before the process of purification and refinement can continue.
Perhaps Colquhoun was also thinking of Christ and his sacrifice for the sake of humanity. John XII 24 put it like this:
Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone:
but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
The image itself conjoins body organs with facial features.
See Heart of Corn (1940) for another work with the same name.
Reference
Frazer, Sir J.G. The Golden Bough. Macmillan and Co. London. Abridged edition 1922.