'Sybil', Cecil Collins

Artwork details

Artist

Cecil Collins (1908‑1989)

Title

Sybil

Date 1960

MediumLithograph on paper

Dimensionsimage: 405 x 305 mm

Collection

Tate

Acquisition Bequeathed by Elisabeth Collins, the artist's widow, through the Art Fund 2001

Reference

P11847

View this artwork by appointment, at Tate Britain's Prints and Drawings Rooms

Summary

Sybils, the women prophets of Greek and Roman legend, frequently appeared in Collins’s paintings and prints. He recounted in an interview in 1979: ‘They [Sybils] seem to be visions of certain functions of the feminine soul – prophetic, oracular, sometimes coming out of caves, guardians of altars, uttering prophesies. They are, as it were, the voice of the unknown or entries into the unknown land, guarded in my paintings, I think seldom by a man but practically always, by a woman or an Angel’ (Cecil Collins, ‘Theatre of the Soul’, interviews, 27 September and 13 October 1979, Keeble, p.121).

Collins pursued his vision of a lost paradise, destroyed by the mechanisation of the modern world, throughout his lifetime. Creating his own version of archetypal figures, such as the Fool and the Angel, Collins attempted to reveal to us our innermost selves. These figures, he believed, represented an innocence that had ceased to exist in the ‘Machine Age’ (Keeble, p.73)… (read more)