'My works are visual music of the kingdoms of the imagination. There is in all human beings a secret, personal life - untouched, protected, won from communal life. It is this sensitive life which my art is created to feed and sustain: this real life deep in each person.' (Cecil Collins, quoted in the introduction to the catalogue of his exhibition at The Bloomsbury Gallery, London, 1935)

Cecil Collins was a British painter of visionary subjects. Maintaining a mystical outlook throughout his oeuvre. Influenced by the prophetic writings of William Blake, he was briefly associated with The Surrealist Group, exhibiting alongside them at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition Collins soon shook off the surrealist label preferring to explore (mytho) poetic consciousness in art on his own terms as outlined in his book ‘The Vision of the Fool’. Collins’s landscape represents another order of reality in which a multitude of natural forms coexist, and human heads reside on clouds. He considered the head to be the ‘theatre to the soul’ and the ‘flowering of human nature’ is a common symbol throughout his works. The incorporation of the head into the scene renders it a ‘spiritual personification of the landscape it inhabits.’ Often considered a representation of the ‘anima’ (inner self), ‘The Tree’ subscribes to the highly spiritual nature of the artists’ works, recognised throughout his oeuvre.