HEART OF CORN, 1940
Watercolour. 5 x 3¼in. (13 x 8.4cm.)
Inscribed on the reverse: ‘Diagrams of Love’ together with the title and the date.
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
See Heart of Corn (1941) for another work with the same title. Both works share an organic subject matter but are otherwise different in form and colour. The earlier work has no obvious visual parallels, whilst the later one share features with several of the Diagrams of Love and Christian Marriage Figures of the period.
Fecundity and reproduction are the subject matter, often personified as the goddess of fertility who presides over generation and growth. She is familiar in many guises throughout history as corn maiden and corn goddess. She appears variously as Isis, Astarte and as Persephone and Demeter in the Eleusinian mysteries. She is also one of the personifications of Malkuth, the tenth of the Sephiroth in the Tree of Life, who had earlier appeared in Colquhoun’s Design for a Painting on Silk (1934).
See note to Diagrams of Love (1940).