Mystery solved

The Saga of Ithell Colquhoun part 2 by David Redfern LG

To recap, a London salesroom asked me to confirm the exhibiting of a painting by Ithell Colquhoun in a London Group exhibition of 1947 as a label on the reverse of the painting claimed to show. The president of The London Group at the time was Elliot Seabrooke (1886-1950). Elected to the Group in 1920 he was very much of “The Old School”, a painter of still-lifes and landscapes heavily influenced by Cézanne, a steady hand on the tiller as the Group regained momentum after the Second World War. On the Committee sat Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers, ex-Euston Road School and Cézanne aficionados; it was unlikely that they would have much truck with a surrealist. Colquhoun was not an elected member of The London Group so why would one of her paintings have a London Group exhibition label on the back? If she was not a member then she must have put her painting forward in an open submission process for the 1947 exhibition and a label on the back would have been for the benefit of the shippers and the Selection Committee. It looks as though Ithell had been rejected by the exhibition Selection Committee. My contact at the salesroom agreed and removed the 1947 exhibition from the painting’s provenance.

The “London Group, 1947 Exhibition” was a massive undertaking in the cavernous RBA Galleries. There were two hundred and eighty-seven exhibits with fifty-one of the seventy-four London Group members exhibiting, the remaining exhibits chosen from open submission. A selection of successful non-member open submission artists makes for interesting reading, Margaret Mellis, Prunella Clough, L.S. Lowry, Anthony Eyton (our oldest current member), John Minton and Julian Trevelyan many of whom would go on to be elected to the Group in the future. The titles in the exhibition catalogue reveal a taste for landscape and still-life, indicating a rather conservative outlook on contemporary painting and sculpture. Ithell Colquhoun would have to wait for another seventy-eight years for her talent to be revealed and celebrated.

David Redfern LG, 2025