James Henry Cecil Collins MBE (23 March 1908 – 4 June 1989) was an English painter and printmaker, originally associated with the Surrealist movement.

Life and works

Collins was born in Plymouth and worked first as a mechanic at a firm based in Devonport. From 1924 to 1927 he attended Plymouth School of Art. In 1927 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he won the William Rothenstein Life Drawing Prize. From 1951 to 1975 he taught at the Central School of Art. Later, one of his pupils was Ginger Gilmour. Collins' style in centered around pagan and early christian imagery in many of his works. The figure of the fool was an important one as well in his vision of the world and art (especially in his essay collection The Vision of the Fool), describing it as "an idealistic figure" pushing back against the "mechanic jungle of the contemporary world", representing "the poetic imagination of life, as inexplicable as the essence of life itself". Collins was awarded an MBE in June 1979. BBC Radio ran a programme about him in 1981 in the Conversations with Artists series, with Edward Lucie-Smith. In 1984 BBC TV showed a 30-minute documentary devoted to Collins, 'Fools and Angels', in the 'One Pair of Eyes' series. A retrospective exhibition of his prints was held at the Tate Gallery in 1981. A retrospective of his paintings took place (before Collins died) in 1989. He was buried on the western side of Highgate Cemetery. His widow Elisabeth Collins died in 2000 and, in 2008, 250 of Collins' paintings worth £1 million were given to museums and galleries in the UK. In honour of the centenary of his birth, an exhibition of Collins' work took place at Tate Britain in Autumn 2008.

Exhibitions