Ithell Colquhoun ( 9 October 1906 – 11 April 1988) was a British painter, occultist, poet and author. Stylistically her artwork was affiliated with surrealism. In the late 1930s, Colquhoun was part of the British Surrealist Group before being expelled because she refused to renounce her association with occult groups. Colquhoun was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India, but brought up in the United Kingdom. After studying at the Slade School of Art, she lived briefly in Paris before moving back to London. She spent the latter part of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1988. Biography Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was born in Shillong, Eastern Bengal and Assam, British India, the daughter of Henry Archibald Colebrooke Colquhoun and Georgia Frances Ithell Manley. Colquhoun was educated in Rodwell, near Weymouth, Dorset, before attending Cheltenham Ladies' College. She became interested in occultism aged 17, after reading Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema. Colquhoun studied from 1925 at Cheltenham School of Art, and at Slade School of Art in London from October 1927, where she was taught by Henry Tonks and Randolph Schwabe. While at the Slade, she joined G.R.S. Mead's Quest Society, and in 1930 published her first article, "The Prose of Alchemy", in the society's journal. In 1929, Colquhoun received the Slade's Summer Composition Prize for her painting Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, and in 1931 it was exhibited in the Royal Academy. Despite her studies at the Slade, Colquhoun was primarily a self-taught artist. After leaving the Slade in 1931, Colquhoun spent several years traveling. She established a studio in Paris, where she first encountered surrealism, reading Peter Neagoe's essay What is Surrealism? During the 1930s she also spent time in Greece, Corsica, and Tenerife. While in Greece, Colquhoun met and became infatuated with a woman, Andromache "Kyria" Kazou, who was the subject of several drawings and paintings and an unpublished manuscript, "Lesbian Shore". Kazou appears to have visited Colquhoun in Paris, and Colquhoun later invited her to move to London so they could live together, though Kazou never did so. Colquhoun exhibited three paintings in Paris in 1933, and one work at the Royal Society of Scotland in 1934. In 1936, she had her first solo exhibition at the Cheltenham Art Gallery, where she showed 91 works. A solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London followed in the same year. Colquhoun's interest