GROTTO OF THE SUN AND MOON, 1952
Oil on canvas. 47½ x 35½in. (122.0 x 91.5cm.)
Signed, inscribed and dated ’52 on the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 509. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue
Sotheby’s, Conduit Street, 16th January 1986, lot 11.
Bonhams, Knightsbridge, 27th October 1994, lot 99.
Exhibited
Cambridge, Heffer Gallery. 1953.
Ostend, Belgium, Cultural Centre, 1963, No. 1.
Newlyn, Newlyn Art Gallery, 1961, No. 8.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 15.
Literature
Fantasmagie March 1962, issue No. 9, p17. illustrated in b/w.
The work was painted as the result of a vivid dream experienced in 1942. It is difficult to overrate the importance of the dreaming state in Colquhoun’s art and magic. She kept dream diaries throughout her life and used dream content as a source for her paintings, poems and prose. They were also a primary source of occult insight. The importance of the dream that inspired this painting is demonstrated by the fact that she wrote about her search for its meaning on a number of occasions. Further, it is one of only three paintings which she also tried to explain in words. The others are Design for a painting on Silk, 1934 and Dance of the Nine Opals, 1942.
She describes her dream as follows:
“The approach to the grotto is a wide unroofed corridor or narrow courtyard, something like the entrance to one of the circular tombs of Mycenae. (One remembers the very pale Mycenaean gold, thinly beaten out.) Above the high wall at the opposite end the sky burns intensely blue. In the middle of this wall a triple archway is hollowed out, the surfaces at right-angles painted in true-fresco with deep yellow, flower-pink and slate blue. This design is mainly abstract, but sun’s rays are suggested at the top of the central arch on the wall-surface facing the spectator.
Inside the arch rises a mass of dark porous substance like pumice-stone, but each of its holes is large enough to admit the passage of a ray of light. These rays seem to shine through the holes from the hidden core of the Grotto, some are paler than others, and I understand that they proceeded from the Sun and Moon. Each hole represents some crisis in the annual cycle of these luminaries; and as at Stonehenge a gap in the circle allows the sun, rising on midsummer day, to strike a certain stone, so here the light streams through each hole in its own season; yet all appears to be happening at the same time, as though transcending time itself. A voice told me that this was ‘The Grotto of the Sun and Moon, Nicaragua’.”
Colquhoun goes on to describe how the meaning of the dream has eluded her and how a psychologist had advised her to paint her dream. It may be that the psychologist was Alice Buck, a Jungian therapist. In the early 1950s Colquhoun was a member of a therapy group which she ran and which focussed on dream interpretation.
The dream retained a fascination for her and inspired her to research the topography and archaeology of Nicaragua.
She set forth her final conclusions in an essay dated 1979, that: ‘the Grotto was an occult centre used by an eponymous order which existed in the past or still exists, either in that state of being commonly recognised as reality today, or else in regions variously called the Higher Worlds or the Inner Planes. For some reason I obtained a glimpse of this mysterious centre, and now if I receive an idea or perception which does not seem to be a direct result of anything I have read, heard or thought, I take it to be a message from the Order… One may speculate that the teaching of the Order takes up an equally-balanced position between the forces of Yang and Yin, to use a far Eastern term now modish in the West where the words Sun and Moon were once understood in a similar sense.’ (TGA 929/2/1/43)
A watercolour study for this work is known.