There is a small body of commercial work. All items currently known are designs for covers: four book jackets and two magazine covers. Page proofs and drawings in the National Trust bequest suggest that other work may have been completed, but their publishing history, if any, has not been traced.
Magazine covers
The earliest is an oil painting for the front cover of Ideal Home magazine, for the issue dated June 1946. The painting shows a modern house and a large well-ordered garden. The setting is a real one, in Esher, and was the subject of an illustrated article on pages 22-25. Given the high vantage point, one wonders whether the work was painted from a photograph. A considerable proportion of the foliage has been painted using decalcomania. The original painting is with the National Trust.
The second is a pencil and ink drawing that was executed for the cover of Eidos magazine. Eidos was ‘a journal of painting, sculpture and design’. Colquhoun’s drawing was described as a ‘design based on the φ spiral’. It was chosen to represent the eternally recurrent rhythm of life itself: ‘being numerically related to the Fibonacci series which is fundamental in nature and unwinding in the proportions of the Golden Section which is fundamental in art, it has a creative as well as an historical application’. The journal was a glossy production, printed on art paper, and included articles on diverse matters including Minoan gems, cave art and contemporary industrial design. The advisory committee consisted of W.P. Gibson; Bernard Ashmole; Leigh Ashton and John Rothenstein. It lasted for three issues, all appearing in 1950. The Tate archive contains the drawing at TGA 929/4/4/4.
Book jackets
The book jackets were all designed for the publisher Peter Owen. The books were:
Pauline: The House of Barnery vol 2 by Jacques Chardonne (1955)
Reminiscences of an Epicure by Francis Cunynghame (1955)
The Clothes of God: a Treatise on Neo-analytic Psychology by Alice Buck
and Claude Palmer (1956)
For further information regarding Colquhoun’s relationship with Buck see the section of this website Dreams and the Occult.
Writings of Edith Stein edited and translated by Hilda Graef (1956).
Edith Stein was born in 1891 into a German-Jewish family. She became an atheist before converting to Catholicism in 1922, continuing her theological and philosophical studies as a Carmelite nun. She also wrote prayers and poems. Her Jewish background led to her arrest in 1942 and her deportation to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in the gas chambers in the same year.
Colquhoun’s design for the Edith Stein book was particularly troublesome. Peter Owen gave detailed feedback when Colquhoun submitted her first design: ‘I am afraid none of us likes it much…It has been seen by a student of Carmelite Spirituality, who feels that it fails to represent the Edith Stein idea’
The first specific criticism concerned the Gothic lettering:
‘This is not legible…I think we should just have a suggestion of Gothic lettering, not strictly to form.’
Other criticisms included the picture of the nun: ‘We feel that this is a little frivolous for the purpose, though, of course, interesting. Edith Stein was both a very scholarly philosopher and an advanced religious, so if you could bear this in mind it might lead to something more representative.’ Owen also had specific suggestions regarding the surround: ‘I think this might be made more ornamental with a touch of purple. Please, if possible, assimilate Catholic symbols. We have in mind a kind of Garland – but use your own judgement.’
Some of the original artwork for the jackets is in the possession of the National Trust. The Tate Archive has a file of correspondence from Owen at TGA 929/1/1589-1669.
Note
This list excludes the jackets that Colquhoun designed for her own books: The Living Stones and The Crying of the Wind. It should be noted that the jacket designs for The Sword of Wisdom and Goose of Hermogenes are not by Colquhoun.
