DANCE OF THE NINE OPALS, 1942
Oil on canvas. 22½ x 28in. (51 x 69cm.)
Signed and dated ’42. Signed and inscribed on the stretcher.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 524. Illustrated in the catalogue.
Christies, London 22nd May 1996. Lot No 37. Illustrated in the catalogue.
Exhibited
London, London Museum, 1942, No 3, dated as 1941.
Leicester, City Art Gallery, 1942, No. 48, as 1941.
Derby, Derby Art Gallery, 1945.
London, Hampstead Artist’s Council, 1947, no. 48.
Travelling Exhibition, Society of Mural Painters, 1950, No. 14.
London, Leva Gallery, 1974, No. 15.
Penzance, Newlyn Orion Gallery, 1976, No. 12.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1985, No. 41.
Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, 1999.
Canterbury, The Herbert Read Gallery, 1986, No. 80. Illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, 2002-03, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. 2008. Illustrated in
colour in the catalogue.
Literature
Museums Journal, Nov. 1942. Illus. b/w frontispiece, facing p185.
In letters to J.F. Hendry (April 17 1947, University of Glasgow Special Collections MS Gen 549/529 and 1948 MS Gen 549/531) it is clear that Colquhoun was negotiating to sell this work to Hendry. As the work remained in the artist’s possession until 1986, it is evident that the sale was unsuccessful.
Art and Artists, July 1986 , illus. col. p.19.
Illustrated in colour by Remy (1999) pl. 121, discussed p. 244.
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. b/w, pl. 30.
The work is partly naturalistic and partly imaginative. The stone circle is based on the Merry Maidens stone circle, which lies a few miles from Penzance, Cornwall. The name enshrines the legend that the stones represent girls who were petrified as a punishment for dancing on the Sabbath. The standing stones in the background that form an entrance way are based on the Pipers, a pair of standing stones that are adjacent to the circle and may be associated with a ceremonial causeway. In legend they are the petrified remains of musicians who played for the dancing girls. The mountain range in the background that encloses the site, making it a special place, is an invention. The artist has reduced the number of stones in the circle from nineteen to nine. Nine is the number of creation and the Opal is the October stone. The allusion may be to Colquhoun’s own birthday, which was October 9th.
A stream of energy wells up from a subterranean source and arcs into tendril- and feather- like forms at the top of its stream. The energy stream and the glowing stones are joined by lines that enclose and define the circle like a force field. The separate elements of the painting are joined one to another by the interconnecting lines in such a way that – apart from the formal achievement –the hidden currents of relationships become visible reality. The lines stream like spiritual bridges, incorporeal yet visible, occupying yet creating space.
Colquhoun believed that lines of magnetic current girdled the earth, emerging at nodal points where the etheric current of the land could be linked with forces from heavenly bodies (see The Living Stones p160).
She also believed in ‘chthonic power-centres’ that periodically erupt as geysers of energy (See her article Pilgrimage, 1979). She described these ‘fountains out of Hecate’ as being frequently associated with Holy wells, underground streams, etc. and speculated that, just as there are centres where power seems to rise from subterranean sources, there are probably also centres situated above the ground whose power showers down.
The Merry Maidens is the stone circle which the unconventional archaeologist Tom Lethbridge attempted to date by means of dowsing. Touching a stone with one hand and planning to count the revolutions of a rotating pendulum held in the other, ‘the hand resting on the stone received a strong tingling sensation like a mild electric shock and the pendulum itself shot out until it was circling nearly horizontally to the ground (p15). His theory was that excited people dancing wildly round the ring during religious ceremonies held at the circle formed a kind of dynamo and the stones had stored the ‘bio-electrical’ force.
The device of connecting key points of the composition by lines of force was a common one for Colquhoun at this period. Writing of a painting of a standing naked man that he had seen in her studio in the early 1940s, Derek Stanford wrote: ‘From every high point and opening of the figure radiated out in circling curves a line of circling astral force completely surrounding the man. The colouring was rainbow bright, and the effect of the picture as a whole was both extremely sensuous and ethereal.’
The importance of this workto Colquhoun is indicated by the fact that it is one of only three of her works for which she attemped a prose explanation (unpublished manuscript at TGA 929/2/1/17):
1) The stone circle is a petrified ‘Hexentanz’; it is here seen as one of the ‘psychic zones’ of the country-side.
2) A Celtic solar festival or fertility-rite; the Maypole’s streamers are replaced by coloured ‘lines-of-force’ connecting the stones with the central fountain and with each other.
3) The nine planets of traditional astrology, including Pluto and Vulcan, revolving round the cohesive and dynamic force of the solar system.
4) Apollo, symbolised by the sun-burst in the centre of the ring, ‘leading his choir, the Nine’.
5) The common chord, symbolised by the three tints – one of them basic – in each stone, carried through an octave, including the first two accidentals. The ‘music of the spheres’.
6) Kether (‘the crown’) mitigating the nine lesser sephiroth – often represented in cabalistic tradition as a tree of life.
7) A supernatural flower with nine petals and fiery pistil.
8) The nine moons of pregnancy with perpetual solar impregnation.
9) The opal signifying by its combination of colours the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds. By its connection with the Zodiacal Libra, it links the whole morphological system with the idea of a balance between static and dynamic forces.
Colquhoun sent a copy of her explanation to Herbert Read, whose reply, dated 13 Oct. 1942 is at TGA 929/1/1847.
A watercolour study for this work exists.
References
Remy, M. Surrealism in Britain. Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999.
Colquhoun, I. The Living Stones: Cornwall. Peter Owen, London, 1957.
Colquhoun, I. Pilgrimage. Sangreal, 1979, Vol 2, No.1
pp29-31.
Lethbridge, T.C. The Legend of the Sons of God. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1972.
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007.
Stanford, D. Inside the Forties. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1977.