Mystical Pilgrim Lady is a freely worked painting of visionary subject-matter. Cecil Collins systematically worked from the imagination to devise images of a world beyond. The eponymous pilgrim makes her way through an eery landscape, peopled by demonic plants and set against a looming mountain range. Perspective has been exaggerated and the proportions of the picture reflect the artist’s concerns: the pilgrim stands tall over the scene, towering above the distant mountain peaks. She is dressed in extraordinary clothing, with an umbrella-like hat that protects her from sun and rain, a flowing white dress, a bag in one hand, and a crosier-like walking staff in the other. The costume is vigorously worked with a coarse brush, thin paint, and bright rhythmic patterns in yellow, red, blue and white. The piquant atmosphere of the scene is enhanced by the darkened sky: a single cloud floats across it and a solar eclipse appears to be taking place.

It is uncertain when Mystical Pilgrim Lady was painted. Collins’s work was thematically consistent throughout his career and certain subjects recur over long periods. He continually sought to explore a spiritual world which exists beyond the visible world and, to unveil it, he used mystical Christian iconography of angels, pilgrims and the Fool. One of the earliest representations of pilgrimage in his oeuvre is from 1934 (fig. 1), and he returned to this theme perennially, often using the traditional pilgrim’s symbol of a beach shell to identify these figures. In The Pilgrim Fool (1943, Private Collection), Collins conflated the Pilgrim with an image of the Fool – a subject originated by Collins and used as a symbol of the poet and the artist who strives against the mechanised modern world. Pilgrimage was a significant theme for Collins as it represented a more universal search for meaning and spiritual fulfilment. Beside Mystical Pilgrim Lady, other works to address this theme include The Quest (1938, Tate Collection) (fig. 2) in which a boatload of noble characters traverse a treacherous black lake.

Cecil Collins and his wife Elisabeth lived in Cambridge between 1948 and 1970, subsequently moving to a flat in Paultons Square, Chelsea. It was in London that Collins met the documentary film-maker Jonathan Stedall (b. 1938). Stedall was given Mystical Pilgrim Lady by Collins, and he has written about his friendship with the artist in a volume of recollections published to celebrate Collins’s life. Stedall was a close confidant, describing Cecil and Elisabeth as ‘my real companions in London for all the years that I knew them’. He helped Collins to catalogue his work, regularly visited the cinema with him and his wife, and latterly inherited their flat in Chelsea. ‘It’s wonderful to have Cecil’s paintings’, he wrote, ‘because the more you look at them, the more they mean. […] With a painter like Cecil who thought so deeply about things and then did what he could, when you see these paintings and look at them again, I find that you can tap into much more than what is on the canvas.’ Stedall was a deeply sympathetic viewer and his response to Collins’s work supplies an insight into the artist’s intentions.

Though Collins was briefly associated with the surrealist movement in Britain, with two works included in the seminal International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in 1936, he was soon expelled because of his deep-rooted attachment to religion and its iconography. Though he shared an interest in the ineffable world beyond appearances, the secular Jungian aspect of surrealism was at odds with his practice. Though Collins’s work has been associated with the neo-romanticism which dominated British art of the late 1930s and 1940s, his themes and imagery were mystical, borne of the imagination, and highly personal to himself.