TENDRILS OF SLEEP I, 1944
Oil on board. 21¾ x 11¾in. (56.0 x 30.0cm.)
Signed, inscribed with the title and dated 1944 on the reverse and on labels attached to the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, 24th April 1985, lot 525.
Christies, South Kensington, 18th October 1990. Lot No 320. Illustrated in the catalogue.
Private collection, London.
Exhibited
London, Hampstead Arts Council, 1944, No. 142.
London, Mayor Gallery 1947, (paintings) No. 5 as Tendrils of Sleep. Illustrated in the catalogue.
Penwith, (Spring) 1950 No. 76.
Newlyn, (Summer) 1961 No. 33.
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1961, No.10, as Tendrils of Sleep. Visible in an installation photo of the exhibition published in Hardie, p.123.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 5, as unsigned.. Canberra, Australia, 1993, No. 35, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Wolverhampton, Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, No. 23.
The technique is decalcomania. The painting resembles an aerial or satellite view of a mountain range with rivers and lakes flowing through a central valley. It is reminiscent of Leonardo’s birds-eye view of Southern Tuscany Val di Cjiana (c.1502) where the rivers and lake systems are laid out like a relief map. A map allows us to understand the territory that is depicted. Here, Colquhoun depicts inner terrain.
Colquhoun used the title in a phrase that occurs in the opening paragraph of The Living Stones. Writing of her spiritual home she says:
‘My origin was there and there I would return other than in dreams. I would see that country with the eye-lashes untangled by the tendrils of sleep, hear the forgotten but re-echoing sounds, savour again that smell now remembered from half-open trunks; savour again the taste, the different touch even of the air.’ (p.11)
The counterpart to this work exists and shows evidence of some reworking.
References
Colquhoun, I. The Living Stones: Cornwall. Peter Owen, London, 1957.
Hardie, M. (ed). 100 Years in Newlyn: Diary of a Gallery. Patten Press, Penzance, 1995.