Private
Marion Adnams
(1898 - 1995)
Bouquet of Winter Roses (Hellebores)
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Marion Adnams (1898 - 1995)
Size:
Height – 77.8cm
Width – 58.5cm
During her six-decade career, Marion Adnams forged a reputation as a painter of deeply distinctive and dream-like visions inspired by the Surrealist movement. Fascinated by stones, shells and other objects found in the countryside, she created disturbing juxtapositions to produce meditations on life and death. From her home in Derby, painting trips to the South of France provided her main inspiration. Adnam’s studio book records that this composition, strongly influenced by the doorway at La Chartreuse Notre-Dame-du-Val-de-Bénédiction, located in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, in the Occitanie région, was painted in May and June 1962. The monumental portal, by François de Royers de la Valfenière, was inaugurated in 1660 when Louis XIV, accompanied by Cardinal Mazarin, passed though it with great ceremony. Such illustrious associations contrast with the diminutive figure passing through the archway, a subject rich in symbolism enhanced by the motif of the mirror-like shadow in the middle ground, which looks on to a familiar landscape that features in many of Adnam’s compositions of this period.
Marion Adnams initially trained as a modern languages teacher; however, woodcuts she made while travelling in Europe during the 1920s received significant praise when she exhibited them at Derby Art Gallery, prompting her to re-train at Derby School of Art during the 1930s. She qualified as an art teacher in 1938 and in 1946 she became Head of Art at Derby Diocesan Training College.
From the late 1930s onwards, Adnams became known for her distinctive Surrealist paintings, and exhibited in local galleries and in London, including at the British Art Centre and the Modern Art Gallery Although she never formally joined any Surrealist societies, she made a significant contribution to the movement, particularly regarding female/male dichotomies within the group, which she explored extensively in her work. In 2017 she was the subject of a retrospective at Derby Art Gallery.
She wrote extensively, including an unpublished Autobiography.
