JUDITH SHOWING THE HEAD OF HOLOFERNES, 1929
Oil on canvas. 48 x 36in. (121.92 x 91.44cm.)
Provenance
University of London: College Art Collections.
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1931.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1935, No. 14.
This painting was awarded equal first prize in the Summer Composition Prize, Slade School of Art in 1929. The Summer Composition Prize was the most prestigious of the Slade competitions. It was intended to develop skills in large-scale figure compositions and as a continuation of the tradition of history painting. Set titles for the competition were usually drawn from the Bible, the classics or more recent literary sources.
According to the Book of Judith, one of the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, Judith, during the siege of her home town by the Assyrian general Holofernes, managed to seduce him and then decapitate him in his bed whilst he slept. Her patriotic deed inspired her countrymen to rise up and rout the invading army, thereby saving the city.
Colquhoun depicts Judith in her moment of triumph. In her diaphanous robes she strikes a confident pose as she stands, one hand on hip, holding aloft the severed head of Holofernes in the other. Compositionally, she makes a strong diagonal from the lower left to the upper right, a movement that is balanced by the rather gravity-defying streams of blood that issue from Holofernes’s neck.
The painting incorporates the golden section. The psychological crux of the painting is the triumphal stare in Judith’s eyes as she holds aloft Holofernes’ severed head. The eyes of Holofernes, who looked at Judith with lust and paid for it with his life, are level with those of Judith. Both pairs of eyes are placed at the golden section of the height of the painting.
Judith and attendant figures are arranged around a campfire. Their postures form a rising spiral that culminate at Holofernes’s head. To accentuate its role in the story and the composition, the head stands out against a locally dark patch of background and is disproportionally large.
Towering, somewhat fanciful, buildings and wooden walls dominate the background, giving the composition a closed in, rather claustrophobic, atmosphere.
The cartoon for this work was still in the artist’s possession in 1972. It is now in the Tate Gallery Archive.