DESIGN FOR A PAINTING ON SILK, 1934
Watercolour or gouache on ?tracing paper. 72 x 46in. (183 x 117cm.)
Signed and dated ‘Colquhoun /34’ lower left.
Provenance
Penzance, Penlee Art Gallery, gifted in 1999.
The passage of time has not been kind to this delicate work. When examined in April 2003 the corners were flaking and torn.
The painting is the subject of an unpublished essay by Colquhoun, a typescript of which is at TGA 929/2/1/23.
The design represents Malkuth (the Kingdom), tenth Emanation of the Sephirotic Decade and lowest of the ‘Blossoms’ on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The magical image of Malkuth is said to be ‘a young woman crowned and veiled’; and she is called ‘the Daughter’, ‘the Queen’, ‘the Bride’, and ‘the Virgin’; and again, ‘the Gate of the Garden of Eden’. In the design - which in itself is suitable for the decoration of a Doorway - Eden is suggested by the tree against which the figure of the young woman stands, and by the ‘Four Rivers’ that flow out of it. Here again one can trace the pattern of the ‘Tree of Life’ with its ten ‘blossoms’, the first of which, Kether (‘the Crown’) seems to rest above the girl’s head. In the colour and treatment of the background is some hint of ‘Jannat al ’Adn’, the Arab Garden of Eden and lowest of the Heavens, which is said to be made of red pearls; and perhaps some indication too of the tenth plague of Egypt, the ‘water-turned-to-blood’.
As leader of the tenth Order of Qliphoth, Malkuth is called ‘the Evil Woman’ or (simply) ‘the Woman’. In the Egyptian hierarchy she corresponds to the unwedded Isis, to Isis as Virgin; in the Greek to Psyche and Persephone; in the Roman, to Proserpine and some aspects of Ceres; in the Christian, to ‘Ecclesia Christ!’, the Church imagined as the Bride of Christ. Among the phantastic animals of myth she corresponds to the enigmatic Sphinx; and in various systems of folk-lore she appears as the Corn-Maiden who presides over growth and vegetation. She is the tenth Heaven of Assiah, the ‘Sphere of the Elements’; and in the ‘Queen’ scale of colour she is allotted the four colours which symbolise these elements. Her own particular element, however, is Earth, the ‘wet earth’ in the classification of the ‘Ten Earths’. In alchemical language she is the ‘Medicine of Metals’ and the ‘Mercury of the Philosophers’; in the language of the Tarot she governs the ‘Tens’ of each of the Four Suits - the ‘Empresses’ or ‘Princesses’. Of the ten virtues of the Adept she represents Scepticism. In the Qabalistic division of the soul into different parts, she is Nephesh, the Animal Soul that perceives and feels; and in the more complex division of the Hindu she is the almost-physical envelope, the ‘Sthula Sharira’. From the Forty Buddhist meditations she evokes the meditation ‘on the body’; she symbolises manifested existence, the part of consciousness concerned with environment, the ‘body-of-fate’. In Hindu legend she is Lakshmi or Kundalini, the mysterious ‘fire’ that runs upward through the ‘Lotoses’ or occult nerve-centres of the body.
In the design a suggestion of the Lotos-form is retained in the drawing of the ‘Blossoms’, to trace the connection between the Tantrik and Qabalistic modes of thought. The body is divided according to that of the ‘Perfected Man’ in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and coloured (for the sake of simplicity) in accordance with the Sephirotic attributions of the ‘King’ (‘Jod’) scale of colour; though the ‘Empress’ (Hé) scale would have been more appropriate, since the second ‘Hé’ of the Tetragrammaton corresponds with ‘the Daughter’. The ‘Blossoms’ or Emanations of the Tree and the parts of the body over which they rule are coloured alike. Yellow being Malkuth's predominating colour, it is introduced Into the Tree itself behind the figure, and in the gold with which both Tree and figure are outlined.
It is possible that this is the same work as The Future Eve c.1936.