The visionary English artist Cecil Collins once wrote in his wartime essay The Vision of the Fool (1947): ‘'The saint, the artist, and the poet are all one in the Fool, in him they live, in him the poetic imagination of life lives.” And his innocent and spiritually pure character features in many of his pictures. Collins started painting his series, originally calling them ‘the Holy Fools in around 1939 soon after the outbreak of WW2.
In The Sleeping Fool (1943) he and his muse are depicted in a naive landscape with their eyes closed in reverie and surrounded by flowers. Characteristically the painting is made with the artist’s impasto technique over a layer of lead-white oil but, interestingly, it also seems to have been painted another composition. An inscription on the reverse indicates that the obliterated work was Enchanted Image (1934) which was exhibited at the Bloomsbury Gallery, London in 1935 and at the Barn Studio, Dartington near his home in Devon in 1937.
Whether this reflects either wartime shortages of materials or the artist’s dissatisfaction with a previous unsold work is unknown - but a large circle; radiating lines and parabolic curves enclosing a central diamond are discernible from beneath the surface. The current horizontal composition of The Sleeping Fool has the Fool, the branch and the serpentine horizon predominating, balanced by an upright girl in a chair below the tree in the middle distance. It has been suggested that the prone figure in the front is dreaming the fantastical scene and the idea may well have been sparked by the Tate Gallery’s 1942 acquisition of Marc Chagall’s Le Poète allongé (1915) which Collins could have seen either at the Leicester Galleries, London in January 1942 or the Tate’s Wartime Acquisitions exhibition held at The National Gallery in April-May 1942 in which a male figure is also lying in the foreground.
The Sleeping Fool was purchased the same year it was painted for the Contemporary Art Society from the artist, at his Carlton House Terrace Mews studio, by Sir John Rothenstein (1901-1992), who was Director of the Tate Gallery (1938-64) as well as a member of the Executive Committee of the CAS during the same period. It was exhibited at the artist’s solo show at Alex Reid and Lefevre, London in February 1944 and blown off the wall by a nearby bomb but remained unharmed and redisplayed in another location. The painting was not presented to the Tate Gallery for eight years but was the first work by Collins to enter the Tate’s collection in 1951, the year before Rothenstein was knighted.
