James Henry Cecil Collins MBE (1908 – 1989) was an English painter, printmaker and lecturer associated with the Surrealist movement and renowned for his mystical and visionary New-Romanticist paintings.
Originally apprenticed to an engineering firm he won scholarships to Plymouth School of Art (1924-7) and then Royal College of Art in London (1927-31) where he won the William Rothenstein Life Drawing Prize. His first exhibition was at the Bloomsbury Gallery in October 1935, followed by his first poem being published in 'The New English Weekly' in 1936, and being exhibited in the 'International Exhibition of Surrealism' (New Burlington Galleries) in 1936 alongside works by Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso.
Tate owns a beautiful collection of original paintings as well as his personal papers, presented to Tate Archive, along with the copyright in the entirety of his oeuvre, by his widow, Mrs Elisabeth Collins in 1992.
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